cce blog

weekend in macau

So, I wasn't around the past couple of days. SARS was getting scary, Sophie had a weekend off, I didn't have any more school, so we hopped a ferry and jetfoiled over to Macau (1 hour, ~US$20).

Macau (or, uhm, Macao) is great. There haven't been any cases of SARS reported in Macau so far; no one wears a mask (except for some shop clerks and the HK people in the casinos). The WHO is visiting Macau this week to inspect it, so hopefully it'll turn out okay.

Macau was a former Portugese territory until 1999, and in walking around Macau it's not hard to forget that you're in Asia. The beautiful architecture, pastel-colored buildings, and cobblestone squares with big Catholic churches made me feel like I was in Mediterranean Europe.

Macau's two official languages are Chinese and Portugese. All the buildings, streets, store signs, immigration cards, etc have Portugese as well as Chinese written on them (and English, but not always). I assumed that the Portugese was just a token gesture at first. Our taxi driver from the ferry only spoke Cantonese, and didn't know any of the street names in either English or Portugese.

But when we actually hit the Largo do Senado and started walking around, we immediately heard Portugese being spoken by a group of ... Portugese and Chinese-ish looking people. They were Macanese (explanation, article), mixed Chinese-Portugese people who have been living in Macao for many generations. And they were everywhere: Sophie couldn't get over how many mixed folk we saw on the street. Ethnic spectacles of the day included:

• a Portugese guy speaking fluent Cantonese to a group of (Portugese, Chinese, Macanese) friends in the square.
  
• a mother and daughter, both Eurasian, walking down the street (I've mostly only encountered mixed people from younger generations).
  
• a nice Portugese cafe where the waitresses all looked Chinese but spoke Portugese to each other. Sophie tried to order an orange juice in Cantonese and she didn't really answer in Cantonese, just switched to English because her Chinese wasn't so good.
  
• an 80 year-old Eurasian grandpa sitting on a bench. What I'll look like some day, I suppose.
  
• ... well, a lot more Portugese & mixed people than we expected.
  

We walked through Macau looking at various people, churches, and forts until it began raining and we got hungry. Luckily, the best part about Macao is Macanese food. It's got Portugese, Chinese, even African influences, and it's really tasty. The evening's restaurant was decked out in Portugese decor, but we were still brought two glasses of hot tea as soon as we sat down. I hear they serve a mean Brazilian feijoada here, but I settled on porco balichão, pork cooked with tamarind and shrimp paste and served in a clay pot. Must go back and eat more.

It was a rainy Sunday night and there wasn't much more to do that night so we went to see a cover band play at the Mandarin Oriental hotel "Embassy Bar". They were a group of 6 African Americans called "Project F" from Baltimore who had last been in Jakarta and were playing four nights a week at the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong now. It's a crazy gig, just like the Chicago jazz musicians I met in Beijing, and I still don't understand how out-of-work musicians get recruited to come out to play the bars of Asia. They had the whole hotel cover-band thing down pretty good, doing all sorts of top-40 pop, R&B, and hip-hop music. They sang some Destiny's Child on our request and some big expat guy got them to do a Britney Spears song, which was depressing.

The next morning it was raining, but we found a really nice cafe for lunch that was full of Portugese people, language, and food. I had some weird quiche (with "Portugese prosciutto ham"). The museum was closed, so Sophie bought a deck of cards and showed me how to play blackjack in a cafe and then we set out for Lisboa Casino.

Macao's economy relies mostly on gambling. The casinos draw lots of Hong Kongers and, more recently, mainland Chinese -- I recognized one when he took a moment out of playing blackjack to spit on the casino's carpet a few feet from me. Lisboa seemed the be the gaudiest of all the casinos, and it was certainly very lively. We were still a bit scared to play blackjack (minimum bet HK$100/US$12.50) so after watching all the crazy games (how, exactly, does one play Baccarat?) I got a handful of HK$2-coins (US$0.25) and started playing the slots.

Playing slots wasn't at all what I expected. Right off it seemed easy enough to win 2 or 5 more coins, for some reason; I had heard that slots give you a few small wins to drain the money out of you slowly, but I kept winning 2 more coins and this kept me from having to go get more change. Sophie took a few of my coins and soon I heard bells: she'd won 100 coins, $200, and everyone around her began staring as the coins spat out of the machine. She quit right then, exchanging her winnings for two crisp $100 bills, but I wasn't satisfied and still had a few more coins left.

I played the slots, winning 2, 5 and 10 coins, but still not matching her. Finally, I said, "Just a few more and we'll go," and put in one of my last coins. Soon I'd won $200, too, and we got another bucket and I received my own two crisp $100 dollar bills. The ferry ride home was on me.

Got back to SARS-land ... er, I mean Hong Kong -- and they gave us all medical declaration forms asking us if we had any SARS symptoms, as well as our phone number & address so they could contact us if someone on the ferry turned out to be infected and they needed to quarant- ... er, interview us. We sighed through our masks, which were already on from the ferry ride, caught the subway home (glaring "Don't infect me" at everyone else in the train), and washed our hands thoroughly with antibacterial soap as soon as we got inside. Back in Hong Kong.

Posted by cce at April 8, 2003 02:06 PM | TrackBack