Eating Spicy Piglet in Macau

Spicy piglet .... I couldn't convince Shelly to try it, but it was actually quite good. It would have been easy for her to try, as it was all over the gift shops in Macau, where we spent the first half of our glorious five day Easter holiday weekend.

The spicy piglet seemed to be pounded thin, cooked in some fashion, and then glazed with some kind of sauce. It was not unlike beef -- or pork -- jerky. Shelly warned me that I was eating some kind of weird street meat that had not been kept at a healthy temperature, but I did manage to not get sick. The stack of meat to the left of the spicy piglet has somehow been translated as "Wild Boar of Meat."

This was my third trip to Macau, and only now have I finally seen most of the tourist spots I wanted to visit. We arrived early Thursday afternoon and headed for the rural Coloane fishing village, which I really enjoyed when I visited in February. After having a cup of tea, we went for a wander and I showed Shelly the spot where I first saw China, eight weeks ago. Here I am, all excited about Zhuhai, which we could only barely see across the channel:

Coloane is an old fishing and junk-making village which is now turning more to tourism. There are a number of restaurants in town, and it's nice to stroll along the waterfront. You can also buy all sorts of dried fish. Sorry, Fat Choy, we didn't bring one back for you:

Perhaps the most interesting thing we saw in Coloane was this ferry from Zhuhai. It chugged over to a concrete slope and six or eight tourists hopped in. An immigration official watched them board the boat before heading back to his office.

After a wander, we hopped on an extremely overcrowded minibus and headed to another old village, this one with a much more colonial feel. Macau is changing so quickly -- in 2006, it had more gambling revenue than Las Vegas -- that most of the territory no longer has the "old" feel I felt when I visited in 1996, but some of the old charm still exists. In Taipa Village, for instance, there are five villas built in 1921 to be the summer homes of wealthy Macanese. The villas are now a museum, including one that looks much like it might have in 1921.

The Church of our Lady of Carmel also made a nice early evening photo:

We spent Friday at museums, including the really fantastic Macau Museum, where Shelly demonstrated how well she had paid attention by answering five of five questions correctly and receiving her own personalized certificate. Despite two tries (3 of 5, then 4 of 5), I couldn't get one of my own. (I knew important ones like the fact that the Portuguese first met the Chinese in Malacca [not Macau] but not that some kind of Chinese puppeteers stand up rather than sit down. Psssh.) You can bet that I heard about who won for a good while after we left the museum.

We spent the rest of Friday wandering through an interesting neighborhood called Barra, where we saw a temple to the god of fishermen and a woman walking a dog which was wearing not only a sweater, but also a pair of pants (sorry for the bad photo ... it was near dusk when they wandered by):

As we were leaving town today, we had lunch in a high-end department store, then walked next door and saw three chickens hanging in a kitchen window:

It's not exactly how I'd prepare my chicken...