A Bite of Portugal
Sorry we haven’t posted in a few days. We refused to pay the usurious $25/day for in-room Internet at the Holiday Inn in Macau. Instead, we aimed our computers at the window and picked up someone’s network named “KING” and got spotty connections for free. We also refused to pay the usurious $25/person for breakfast, and walked around town and found lots of fresh-squeezed oranges, and good coffee and cute cakes (though the latter were largely unavailable until after 11 am, for some reason).
The first impression one gets when arriving in Macau is “we’re in Las Vegas”, except without the dry air. Sands, Wynn, MGM Grand. But the dominator is the new Grand Lisboa, which looks like a giant lotus flower if a giant lotus flower had a giant scrotum at the base of it, and whose lobby is decorated with gigantic carved jade statues. Not carved particularly well, but definitely gigantic.
The Holiday Inn is close to the north end of the Stupid Zone and it is a short walk in the morning to the UNESCO Zone. The center of Macau is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and 25 buildings have been identified as World Heritage Buildings for the tourists’ edification. Collect them all. Except the moorish Barracks, which is now the Harbormaster’s Office and not open to the public. And the theater and the Rich Mandarin’s House, which were under renovation, which is how you can tell that a site is important. Our house is also important.
The main square of Macao, on which the building of the Leal Senado (i.e. Loyal Senate, a point on which colonial governments have sought to reassure the imperial power since the days of Egypt and Rome and the Han Dynasty) faces, is a multiple purpose arena. At the moment, the Leal Senado faces the back of a huge television screen, which is broadcasting live from Beijing. Townies and variable numbers of tourists are watching two story high tumblers and swimmers all day long. So, no dramatic pictures of the whitewashed Leal Senado this trip unless we get them from google images.
The World Heritage components stretch northeast and southwest from it like a string of mostly pink and yellow pearls. The top end is the Protestant Cemetery: a well maintained little yard whose stones tell the stories of the brief lives and discomforting deaths of sailors who served their king in the Opium Wars and other commercial conflicts. The bottom end is the temple of A Ma, the goddess who gave her name to the first syllable of Macao via one of the typical misunderstandings that occur when an explorer or invader asks “what is this place” or “who are you” and doesn’t correctly interpret the scope of the answer. In this case, the temple to A Ma, which sounded like A Ma Gao, was taken to mean the whole island. It’s a warren of paths up a rocky hillside, filled with chapels large and small, offerings of incense ranging from the size of the sticks you buy in head shops to the size of the exhaust pipes on large trucks, and especially coils up to a meter in diameter that the worshipers can buy for several hundred Macao Pesetas and leave burning for days.
In the place of honor is the iconic facade of St. Paul’s cathedral. The cathedral is gone, burned. Cue the “Bare Ruined Choirs” sonnet. I must start carrying that one around with me, along with “Ozymandias” which I already have in my wallet. Or maybe even Tintern Abbey, the prototypical allusive tourist’s blog. There is considerably less left of St. Paul’s than there is of Tintern abbey, although more is left now than there has been for a long time. The archaeologists have been digging around and created signs and labels and a small museum with a new reliquary like Donald Judd might have created for holding the relics of saints. Wikipedia informs that the bones actually have been saints’ bones since their canonization in 1851, by which time they were already lost; but they were rediscovered in the 1990s during excavations of the cathedral site. They belonged to the Christians martyred in Japan at the time of a free trade war in the early 17th century. It used to be the most famous mass murder to take place in Nagasaki.
The relics of saints have a certain reality where butchering is not so complete as it is in the west. It links the universe around, that this morning we were looking at the humerus of St. Francis Xavier in the Seminario of St. Joseph in Macau, and (after a hydrofoil ride across the Pearl River) tonight we ate the meat off the same bone of a suckling pig (together with abalone, conpoy stuffed squash, bamboo pith, mushrooms, and a deep brown Cantonese sauce). When you spit out the bone, there is the saint in your mind’s eye.
We left the Casino Zone and the UNESCO zone for an afternoon on an adjoining island called Coloane, which featured a walk in the hills, and a return to a beach Ray visited in 1986. It’s named Hac Sa which means black sand, but at this point it was all mud. A charming path through some rocks in 1986 had become a gross housing development called Hellene Gardens, a name which seemed to me to be the opposite of the Garden of Eden.
Eating in Macau was a break from Chinese restaurants, except for one little place that was paved in oranges in its front window where we had FSOJ and congee with frog or duck for breakfast. We found a couple of nice Macanese restaurants, which are basically Portuguese, but with some characteristic dishes, like African chicken, a chicken in a spicy peanut coconut sauce. Forks instead of chopsticks, and wine instead of beer or tea. And a nice cup of gelato, with durian and guava. Try getting durian gelato in Florence. (I suppose you can, really. durian gelato florence gets 1,120 google hits. It’s also nice having fresh mangosteens from the markets. “mangosteen gelato” gets only 3 hits, and the first of them is in Hong Kong.)
Now we’re in Kowloon, at the Stanford Hillview hotel with free in-room WiFi (but posting the location of the hotel room in Macau). It’s our last few days together on this trip — we’ll be strategically repacking so I can take the souvenirs back to California. We’ll post again soon after exploring the intensely skyscrapered rocks which are Hong Kong.