Macau

Weather-wise, last Thursday was not the ideal day to visit Macau, but with government offices closed much of this week for Chinese New Year and me in need of a Hong Kong ID number to apply for jobs, I braved the coldness and overcastness of the day and boarded a high-speed jet-powered ferry for Macau, 65 km west of Hong Kong.

Macau retains much more of its colonial charm than does Hong Kong, where tearing down historic buildings is one of the government's favorite pasttimes. The same may be true in Macau, I don't know, but if it is, the tearing down must be at a much slower pace than it is here. There are a number of areas in Macau where you almost feel as though you're in Europe. There are no areas of Hong Kong (that I've found, at least) that give you that feeling. Of course, I would not have had to spend all day in Macau, but it seemed like a waste of money not to play tourist since I have the time to do so.

One of the things I like about Macau is many signs are in both Chinese and Portuguese, adding to the European feeling.




Since I had been to Macau a decade ago, I wanted to see something different than what I had seen last time. The problem is, my memory wasn't as good as I thought it was, and I couldn't remember all that much. Looking at my map, I knew I had not ridden a cable car up to the top of a big hill, so I started at the Flora Garden and rode the Guia Cable Car. It was only 3 patacas round-trip (US$0.37), so I figured I couldn't go wrong.

(One Hong Kong dollar is worth MOP$1.03, and both currencies, along with Chinese RMB, are accepted just about everywhere. Shopkeepers will try to give you change in the currency you use to pay the bill, but I often found myself mixing currencies throughout the day. I only took a couple hundred patacas out of the ATM because while you can spend Hong Kong dollars in Macau, you can't spend patacas in Hong Kong.)

I rode the cable car to the top and headed towards the light house, which I thought I shot photograph for Mom and Jer. Once I made it the rest of the way to the top, I realized I had been to the old fort and lighthouse before with my friend Marilyn. The lighthouse (favol, in Portuguese) is the oldest on the China coast, built in 1865. Unfortunately, you can't climb to the top of the lighthouse, but the fort grounds give you a pretty good view of the city, including this one of a public square and Cemetery of St. Michael the Archangel, which we also visited 10 years ago.


The hill around the fort is full of bunkers from World War II and the Cold War, one of which has been turned into a small museum.


After a ride back down the cable car, I headed to the Kun Iam Temple, a Buddhist temple built in 1627. At this temple, the U.S. and China signed their first treaty of trade and friendship in 1844. I had not been here before, and found it to be more "atmospheric" than most temples I've visited in Hong Kong.



I had been trying to figure out Macau's bus system with little luck. I wanted to get out of the central city and visit an old fishing village on Coloane Island. I decided that it couldn't be that expensive to get there by taxi, so I hailed one and hopped in. In Hong Kong, I've never had much trouble communicating with taxi drivers, but the driver I had in Macau, well, let's say that his English was worse than my Chinese. I think he might have been a recent import from the mainland, as he didn't seem to know his way around and he had a picture of Mao dangling from his rear-view mirror. After an unintended detour and 97 patacas (about US$12), we managed to find Coloane Village. It was worth the trip.

It's not that there's all that much to see there; it's more the uniqueness of the village. It's only 65 km from Hong Kong but may as well have been on the other side of the world, the feeling was so different, with interesting old buildings in narrow winding streets.




The other thing I saw in Coloane was China. Looking across the channel, I realized I had never seen China before, which made it worth taking a not-very-good photo of the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone.


I had lunch at an English cafe that served really tasty Thai food and was staffed by a couple of young Thai guys who told me which bus I could take back to the city center, allowing me to save 93 patacas on the return journey.

The bus dropped me off next to the post office and another public square. The square was jam-packed with tourists and a New Year's market. I wandered into Watson's Drogaria looking for some acetominophen for a budding headache and found huge queues of mainland Chinese buying chocolates for the New Year. I pushed my way back out of the store and tried to ignore my headache. I threaded my way through the crowds and walked to what is possibly Macau's most famous attraction, the ruins of the Church of St. Paul. All that remains of the 400-year-old church is the facade; the rest of the building burned down in 1835, when it was being used as a military barracks.


And that was about it for the day. I was beat at that point as I hadn't slept much the night before and had been awake since 5 a.m. I bought a few postcards, had a beer at a streetside cafe and headed back to the ferry terminal. I got back to Hong Kong, activated my visa and texted Shelly to let her know that I am now legal. I went to Immigration on Friday to apply for my ID card, and am now ready to look for work. Wish me luck!

Chinese New Year, Day 2

It's Day Two of Chinese New Year here in Hong Kong. Last night's parade in Tsim Sha Tsui was somewhat of a disappointment, though that may be because I was not patient enough.

I arrived T-S-T, on the southern tip of the Kowloon peninsula, a bit before 7 for a parade that was to begin at 8. Even though the crowds were three or four deep in most places, my amazing gwailo height and a slight upward slope of the sidewalk gave me a decent view and I quickly found a decent spot to watch the parade from. An hour's worth of Bob and Sheri podcasts kept me entertained while I waited for the parade.

And then I listened to another hour. By 9, all I had seen were a bunch of kids doing bicycle tricks and a float from Cathay Pacific, the Hong Kong airline which sponsors the parade. After waiting 10 minutes after the Cathay Pacific float, I gave up and went home. I'm sure there were interesting things to be seen, but I decided that two hours and ten minutes were long enough to stand on a Kowloon street corner.

I did shoot some video on my cell phone and put together this minute-long clip. It's not great quality -- it was shot with a phone, after all, and you're watching it on the Internet -- but it's kind of interesting.

Gung Hei Fat Choy!

The first day of Chinese New Year is upon us, so let me be among the first to wish you Gung Hei Fat Choy! (Loosely translated, this means congratulations and be prosperous; it wasn't until after we named our cat that we learned her name might well bring us wealth. So far, though, if her vet bills are any indication, she's helping us spend, rather than accumulate, wealth.)

It's the Year of the Pig, so Hong Kong's streets are full of pig decorations, including these at the nearby Times Square shopping center, which were part of the "Piggies My Love" public art charity, each designed by a different local artist. I could have bought one of these pigs. Being from Iowa -- the hog capital of America -- I actually thought about it.




Chinese New Year markets sprung up around Hong Kong a week ago, so Shelly and I went to visit the market in Victoria Park Tuesday evening. In large part, the markets were full of tacky pig souvenirs, including the pig snout toilet paper dispenser a vendor tried to sell us:

Vendor: It's real leather!

Me: Really? Leather? (It looked more like pleather to me.)

Vendor: Really! Leather!

Me: Hmmm....

Vendor: I wouldn't lie to you!

Me: Hmmm....

Vendor: Okay, but you can just believe me!

With that last bit of honesty, I was tempted, but not quite enough to spend the HK$150 she wanted. I don't need a 20 dollar pleather toilet paper dispenser....

But the markets are also full of plum trees (for luck), kumquat trees (for prosperity) and chrysanthemums (for longevity). Since I'm about to start looking for a job, I'm hoping the plum branches Shelly brought home will bring me some luck.

In order to invite wealth into our home -- this is also job search related -- I placed nine coins in a red envelope this morning and then put in the apartment's "money corner," which is the back left corner. Shelly is not at all convinced this will work, but then she is skeptical about most everything that cannot be scientifically explained. It really is quite amazing that she married me, a guy who believes in ghosts, UFOs, conspiracy theories and things like red envelopes full of coins bringing wealth into the house.

Many expats get out of town during Chinese New Year (including Shelly, though she's on business rather than holiday). Many shops and most offices shut down for the week and, from what I've heard, there's really not much going on if you're not following the Chinese traditions of visiting family. I'm going to brave the crowds tonight, though, and go to Tsim Sha Tsui for what is supposed to be a great parade, and to Causeway Bay tomorrow night to watch the fireworks over Victoria Harbour. I expect to be fully squeezed and packed into spaces much too small for the number of people them, but that's one of the joys of Hong Kong...

The Death-Defying Acrobatics of Fat Choy

You know, I'd like to have a cat that lives longer than a few years. But the way Fat Choy indulges her love of acrobatic stunts seriously makes me question if she'll be with us for that long.

A couple of months ago, she discovered that she could hop up on top of the shower stall and look down on us while we're showering. She's branched out sitting on the open door next to the shower (although when she moves, the door moves with her, and she never seems terribly happy about that). She's also figured out that she can step from the shower door to the laundry drying rack and that the drying rack will swing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. What fun!

The one that really concerns me, though, is the fact that I found her halfway out the window a couple of days ago. For anyone who has been in our flat, you know that there are only a few inches of window not covered by a coarse chicken wire. The chicken wire is extremely aesthetically displeasing and causes great trouble when trying to open or the close the window, but it has been a fairly effective method of keeping the cat inside. Fat Choy managed to find one of the few spots that remains uncovered. We thought it was inaccessible until we witnessed her climb up the window frame before sticking her head and shoulders through a spaces that measures -- seriously -- two inches high. I don't think she's trying to escape, as she seems quite content here most of the time. I think she's just a bit too adventurous for her own good.

My mother-in-law tells me that their cat has one-quarter the energy of Fat Choy. I tell her I can't wait until Future Fat Choy has one-quarter the energy of Present Fat Choy.

I'm Legal, Finally

It's taken a while for the paperwork to finally get done, but I finally have my dependent visa. With Hong Kong's unemployment rate at historic lows, I'm able to work on a dependent visa, which means my job search will begin this weekend.

In order to activate my visa, I had to first leave Hong Kong, so I took a day trip to Macau today, about 65 km west from here, just across the Pearl River Delta. Shenzhen is closer to Hong Kong, but entering Macau doesn't require a visa, unlike entering the PRC.

Macau is the Portuguese equivalent of Hong Kong and, in fact, predated Hong Kong by a couple of hundred years. After 10 hours of hoofing it around the city, plus another three hours in transit, there's no way I'm going to get any pictures up tonight, as I have to be up early tomorrow to go apply for my Hong Kong ID card at Immigration. I'll get them up this weekend or early next week.

Glutinous Rice: Surprisingly Delicious

Hong Kong is full of streetside snack stands, selling everything from juice to fish balls to waffles (a surprising number of waffles, in fact) and these little glutinous rice dumpings, steamed, stuck on a stick and dipped in a fiery chili sauce. They are, perhaps, Hong Kong's perfect cold weather snack. Plus, they feel great going down my sore throat today.

Our Correspondent Reports from Guangdong

Back from a four-day trip to Guangdong -- just a short ferry ride up the Pearl River from Hong Kong -- Shelly shares a variety of interesting photos with us.

Her trip included a large banquet with glitzy entertainment.

And a visit to a, well, "KLG." I suppose if you change two letters, it's not really one of those famous Chinese rip-off counterfeits. Yeah, sure.

She also came across these three fantastic "be careful of the grass" signs. Say what you will about China, but I've never been asked so politely to stay off the grass anywhere else in the world.

Carrot Soup for Dinner

We had carrot and pork soup for dinner tonight, featuring this green carrot that Shelly picked up in Guangdong Province this weekend. With Chinese New Year approaching, we've recently been seeing a special New Year carrot cake made from this kind of carrot (though this carrot cake is nothing like the carrot cake a Westerner would expect).

Always ready to try something new for dinner, Shell brought the carrot back (I have since spotted them in our local markets, now that I know what they are) and picked up an assortment of seasonings from a friend at work. The seasonings are all dried, and appeared to my untrained eye to three dried oranges, a dried mushroom and lots of dried garlic cloves. The recipe called for six ramen bowls of water, a green carrot, an orange carrot, the seasonings and "$20 of pork." Made in a wok, I brought everything to a boil before misreading Shelly's e-mail: Instead of boiling it covered, as directed, I boiled it for three hours uncovered, and then wondered why I had to keep adding water. Hmm.

Despite my mistake, it turned out okay. Shelly gave it high marks for uniqueness and decent marks for taste.

As for the green carrot, it really is similar in texture to an orange carrot or a turnip. It should make an interesting addition to future dinners, especially if I cook them correctly.

The Guy's Guide to Urinals

Dave Barry has written a lot of stuff that has made me laugh, but one of my favorites is his dissertation on how guys use urinals, from Dave Barry's Guide to Guys:

So in the ideal guy rest room, the urinals would be located a minimum of fifty feet apart. Unfortunately, in the real world, they're right next to each other, which means the guy often must make split-second strategic urinal decisions. To illustrate this process, let's imagine a public rest room in an airport. Let's assume the rest room has a row of five urinals, which are represented as rectangles in the following scientific diagram:


Let's further assume that nobody is in the room when Guy A walks in. He is almost always going to choose on of the end urinals-- either no. 1 or no. 5--because he knows this will put him as far as possible from the next guy who comes along. Let's say Guy A chooses urinal no. 5, which means out situation is now this:


When Guy B walks in, he will ALWAYS take no.1. He would never, ever, in a billion years, take no. 4. To do such a thing would cause Guy A to become alarmed to the point where he might zip up his fly so fast that he risks wetting his pants and possibly even injuring his manhood, rather then remain there. But Guy B will always take the far urinal; he may be a decent, secure, open- minded, nonjudgmental person with absolutely no prejudice whatsoever toward gay people, but he nevertheless would rather poke both of his eyeballs out than have Guy A think that he IS one. So he will go to the other end. If the line of urinals were a mile long, Guy B might very well choose to hike the entire distance, even if this meant he would miss his plane.

So now the situation is this:


When Guy C comes in, he will clearly choose urinal no.3. He is not crazy about it, but he still has a one-urinal buffer on each side:


But now in comes Guy D, and HE has a real guy problem, because whatever urinal he picks, he'll be right next to two other guys. This is very upsetting. Some guys in this situation will choose to pee in an enclosed stall, or wait until there's a buffered urinal available, or go way off to the side and pee against the wall, as follows:


If Guy D DOES go to the one of the available urinals--say no.2.-- he and guys B and C will all stand rigid, staring intently straight ahead, as though the wall tiles were inscribed with a secret formula for turning Grape Nuts into platinum. "DEATH BEFORE EYE CONTACT," this is the motto of a guy at a public urinal.

I realize that you women out there think I'm making all this up. But ask the guy in your life to read this section, and I bet he'll nod in recognition. He's been there, and he knows the behavior I'm describing. But he has never felt comfortable about discussing this subject with you, because this is an extremely sensitive area for him. Also he knows it's stupid.

***

Now, the reason I bring this up is that, based on what I saw today, this book may not have been a big seller in Hong Kong.

I stepped into the restroom in a big mall. I've used this restroom before, as it's fairly near home and close to one of my usual walking routes. This restroom has three urinals, meaning that most guys should pick either the one on the left or the one on the right, but not the one in the middle. Yet somehow, there was a guy at the middle urinal.

This happens some times, you know, and contrary to Dave Barry, most guys I know don't go pee against the wall. It's not a big problem; you just deal with it.

But that's when I saw that the guy wasn't actually using the urinal. He was, instead, holding his kid up, and his kid was using the urinal. Again, this is not a big deal.

Except for one thing. The kid was not his son. It was his daughter, and her legs were spread wide, with her pants around her ankles, her shoes pressed against the sides of the urinal and her pee spraying in the general direction of the urinal.

As for me? There was another restroom one floor up.

An Amazing Race Tune-Up

We tuned up for next week's premier of The Amazing Race: All Stars with tonight's finale of The Amazing Race Asia on AXN.

Two women from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, won the first-ever TAR Asia, making them the first-ever all-female team to win The Amazing Race. TAR Asia was somewhat shorter than the U.S. version, hitting 14 cities in eight countries over about 22,000 miles (the U.S. version typically hits the 60,000 mile mark). Zabrina and Joe-Jer took home US$100,000 for the win.

The Uniqueness of Names

To put it mildly, the names Shelly and I saddle our pets with are far from common. There's an interesting story in the Des Moines Register this morning about pet names in Des Moines.

Apparently, the city of Des Moines has spent the last four years collecting the names of its residents pets. It should come as no surprise that I found not a single "Mister Tanaka" or "Fat Choy" in the entire city (though "Ernie" was the 66th most common name for a cat and the 92nd most common name for a dog).

But "Max," Brad and Laura's cat, has the sixth most common cat name in Des Moines, with 125 feline Maxes in the city. Max's self-esteem is probably better than Fat Choy's: He doesn't get teased about his name by the neighborhood birds and squirrels.

Police Museum, and Back to the Peak

Shelly's in China this weekend, leaving me to do things that might not be as high on her must-see list as they are on mine.

I took the No. 15 bus today towards Victoria Peak, getting off about halfway up the mountain to see the Hong Kong Police Museum. It's definitely an out of the way destination for most tourists, but it was well worth the visit. Photography is prohibited in the museum and since the museum is run by the, you know, police, I don't actually have a photograph of the cool 1960s Triumph cop motorcyle for Jerry, or of the cool bomb removal machine for Sam or of the big collection of narcotics for, well, I don't know who. In fact, the only thing I could get a picture of was this 1960s traffic pagoda, mounted about halfway up the stairs to the museum itself.

The museum features a great history of Hong Kong (the first members of the Hong Kong police department were recruited from London in 1844), a display of summer and winter uniforms through the years, a firearms collection, the aforementioned collection of drugs (lots of opium) and a gallery about the Triads, who are apparently big into the bootleg DVD business these days.

From the museum, I headed back up towards the Peak which, as it turns out, is much further away than it appears to be on my map. I wanted to go back to the Peak for two reasons. First, further up the mountain from where Peak Tram ends, at the actual peak, are the historic Victoria Peak Gardens, where the English governors of Hong Kong kept their summer lodge. While the Japanese burned the buildings themselves during World War II, the gardens remain. It's February, so I didn't shouldn't expect much out of the gardens, and I wasn't surprised. But, as I texted Shelly from the top, the gardens will probably be much, much more impressive in the summer, but the hike up will be much, much less pleasant.

My second reason for visiting? Victoria Peak -- actually the shopping mall near the top -- is home to one of only two Burger Kings in all of Hong Kong, and I needed a burger for dinner.

Trek to the Trappist Monastery

One of the best things about being unemployed is the ability to do touristy stuff when few other people are doing it. Since I'm still unemployed (I am trying to alter that state), I headed off to Lantau Island yesterday to visit the Trappist Monastery which, at one time, produced much of Hong Kong's fresh milk. The brand remains on the shelves today, but the production has moved to the New Territories, where there's more space and, presumably, fewer mountains for the cows to climb.

Lantau is actually twice the size of Hong Kong Island, and its highest peak is nearly twice as high as Victoria Peak. (It's also home to less than 90,000 people, compared to the more than 1.5 million of us who live on Hong Kong.) I wasn't sure there would be much to see at the Trappist Monastery, but something about it tickled my brain and urged me to go, so I set off from Central for Discovery Bay on the high speed ferry. This set me back HK$27, which seemed like an enormous amount of money for transportation in Hong Kong, where the tram only costs HK$2 and a subway ride halfway across the island costs less than HK$7. (It seems much more affordable when I figure that the trip cost less than US$3.50 for a comfortable 25 minute cruise, and that a similar trip in the States would have been many times more expensive.) Discovery Bay is a popular place for expats to live, but (perhaps since we have neither dogs nor children) I can't imagine why. There are a few retails shops near the ferry pier, a decent looking beach and lots of golf carts that residents use instead of cars, but otherwise there seems to be little to the community other than high-rise apartments and condos.

Disco Bay is the start of a coastal trail to the monastery, however, and starting in Discovery Bay gave me the opportunity to take one route to the monastery and a different route home, resulting in more touristy bang for my buck. The trail first took me near the sand and through a couple of small, non-threatening squatter neighborhoods and past several sleepy-looking dogs before turning inland and, therefore, uphill.

It's hard to think of Hong Kong as a place where you can easily escape to the countryside, but while parts of the city are most definitely densely packed urban jungle, parts are closer to actual jungle, especially if you can overlook the concrete path and the skyscrapers in the background.

In the hour I spent hiking to the monastery, I only saw three other people so, at least on a weekday, it is a relaxing hike. Now, whether it should have taken me an hour is another question, but that time does include getting lost in the squatters village. Sadly, it left nobody to explain why there is a collection of what appear to be big mops along the trail. Signs along the trail indicate the area is subject to mudslides in the rainy season, so perhaps they're there for neighborhood residents to come mop the mud away in the summertime.

About 45 minutes into my hike, I came upon a steep road with a sign directing me to go, of course, up. A few steps up the road, I came upon a cross with a big Roman numeral X on it. I'm not Catholic, but after living in the Philippines and on Guam, I know enough to know that I was seeing the tenth Station of the Cross. Also knowing that there are only 14 of them, I knew I was getting close to the monastery and, not coincidentally, the top of the hill.

It wasn't much longer before I came upon the sign, quite literally, that I had been looking for:


I had happily arrived just in time for the afternoon services. The bell was calling the monks as I walked across a short bridge. The monks were walking, all separately, all silently, towards the chapel. The monks here have what I would think of as a challenging life: they're silent all day (except when in prayer) and have their first service of the day at 3:30 a.m. Eventually, ten of them filed into the chapel and began chanting. Once upon a time, there were Western monks at the monastery, but today they're all Chinese.


I don't know how many monks live at the monastery, but there's apparently at least one more who I met at the pier. He came to Lantau on the same kai-to I would take to the island of Peng Chau, where I would catch a ferry back to Central. He did not have to climb the hill, which is probably a good thing, because he looked to be about 90.


The ferry trip back to Central gave me a fantastic view of the western end of Hong Kong, including the neighborhood where Shelly works. The haze wasn't too bad today.

There's also a small lighthouse on the way back from Peng Chau. Now if this can't lure Mom and Jerry to Hong Kong, I don't know what can!

(Sorry guys, I couldn't find any way to get to the lighthouse, though there must be a road somewhere.)

No Scribble, Please

Graffiti is not much of a problem here in Hong Kong, perhaps because of signs like this one posted on a Wan Chai construction site.