Hong Kong, and Macau Day 2

Monday morning I woke up bright and early (read: 6:30). I rolled over in bed and flipped on the TV, and a steady stream of Cantonese started pouring out of a newscaster's mouth. It sounded really really strange. Like Chinese (Mandarin), but different. Of course I couldn't understand anything. A couple times I thought I did, but I think my brain was just doing some wishful thinking there. It was a little frustrating because it sounded close enough to Chinese that I thought I should be able to understand it, but no, to no avail.

I went downstairs and had some breakfast with Jen and a couple of her friends. Then we met up with some others in the lobby and took a taxi over to the ferry terminal. We bought our tickets for the TurboJet and settled in for the hour-plus ride to Hong Kong. Along the way we passed through immigration. That's one amusing thing about the whole trip, actually. The entire time, I stayed within China's borders. However, I had to leave mainland China to get to Macau, leave Macau to get to HK, leave HK to get to Macau, and leave Macau to get to mainland China. I had to go through immigration each time. So my passport received a lot of stamps :-)

The ride into HK was fun. We sang Disney theme songs and watched the terrible ferry-only TV channel provided for us. The weather was crisp and beautiful. Approaching HK, more islands started to appear in the water. Having not seen the ocean for so long, this was very exciting! Soon, more started to appear, dotted with buildings here and there. And then all of a sudden the great skyscraper-filled Hong Kong island appeared! I really wanted to take a picture, but I knew I'd have plenty of chances later.

We debarked and went through immigration, then made our way into the Shun Tak Centre looking for a place to exchange money into Hong Kong Dollars. After some wandering around, we found one, and also an HSBC ATM where I withdrew some money from my bank account. That all went pretty smoothly. Yay for international commerce!

We exited the Centre and went directly into the Sheung Wan subway station. The other kids fiddled about with buying pre-paid metro cards, but I marched over to the ticket window and bought a new RFID metro card (similar to the ones I have for Shanghai and Beijing). When buying, I also asked the teller (in Chinese) how to get to Victoria Peak, since that's the only thing I really knew I wanted to do that day. She told me to go to the Central station, and so I did. My friends were on their way to HK Disneyland and needed to debark at the same station, so they did, but then we went our separate ways.

I exited off the platform and saw a really helpful subway map on the wall. Kind of like Shanghai's subway station maps. You see the surrounding area and major attractions. I saw the listing for the Peak Tram, so I headed out that exit.

I made my way through the Central district, through skyscrapers and parks and hilly roads and double-decker busses, following the tourist signs for the Peak Tram.


















I really love the way that you can look through gaps in the buildings, down alleyways, and see hills in the distance that are dotted with other buildings. To me that's really cool. There's definitely nothing like that in Shanghai. The layout reminded me of a San Francisco, with all the winding hilly roads. But of course, in San Fran they drive on the right side of the road and therefore have no need for these signs on the pavement:



Notice the sign is in Chinese too, because on the mainland they drive on the right side of the road.

In no time I was sweating like a pig under the hot sun, but I found the entrance to the Peak Tram just fine. I paid my ticket and we started on the upward climb:



The climb was pretty damn steep for most of the way. Here's a picture showing the angle of ascent:



I'm holding the camera parallel to the horizon in that shot! I almost felt like I was lying down.

We got off at the Peak Tower, and the whole place was one giant shopping mall. Go figure; that's what HK is famous for! There's even a Madame Tussaud's on top of the mountain. Talk about unnecessary. There's luxury shopping, fine dining, overpriced souvenirs, and so on. I can't imagine going up there for a meal. It's so out of the way and costs 40 HKD just to get to the peak. I guess they have restauraunts up there for the people who go up at night. Seeing a view of the city at night is apparently spectacular, although I didn't do it.

Inside the tower is a bunch of escalators taking you up to the roof of the structure where, if you have paid the extra 10 HKD, you can step out onto the roof and get an unobstructed view of the city. Of course yours truly did so and captured the following amazing shots:













Going to the tops of things is awesome. (Hell, I'm going to do it again on Saturday when I climb Huangshan.) But honestly, it was fun for about 10-15 minutes. Then it's like yeah, it's pretty, but, you know, there are only a couple spots for a good view from the peak. It's not like the Jin Mao tower where you have a 360-degree view of the city. It is great being able to see the city on the water, though.

I'm just glad they didn't charge me for the "Janitor Sleeping in a Bathroom" attraction:



I made my way down from the peak and then began a period of aimless wandering around Hong Kong. I didn't have a tour book, I couldn't really find one, and I was by myself. I ended up taking the metro a lot and navigating the subway system there. I don't know if London's subway system is confusing, but HK's sure is. By comparison, Shanghai's is a model of efficiency! Never thought I'd say that about anywhere.

I ate lunch in the IFC Mall and befriended a Swedish woman who was sitting next to me. She works in a bank upstairs, helping manage the assets of individuals worth $50 million plus. Sheesh! I think that's in HKD, which would make it like 6.4 million USD, but still. I was like "um, I'm never going to need your services." Haha. I ran across a Dymocks and got perhaps inordinately excited about a foreign bookstore! I perused for about 20 minutes and ended up buying this. What an appropriate book to be selling in HK.

I tried taking a random subway trip to the Kowloon Bay stop and seeing if anything interesting was there. A spot on the map advertised "Festival Walk" and I was like ooh, an interesting stroll, yay! But "Festival Walk" turned out to be the name of a shopping mall. I was more than a little disappointed with this discovery and turned around to go home.

(Side note: Every time I think about HK or Kowloon Bay, I think of Wayne's World. There's a scene where Rob Lowe's character is ordering Chinese food, and he speaks Cantonese on the phone. Everyone's amazed at his ability to speak the language, especially Tia Carrera's character, who is from HK. Then Rob Lowe goes "You sound more like Kowloon Bay than Hong Kong." Everyone's amazed again, because she was indeed born in Kowloon Bay. Yup, these are the kinds of things that stick with me. Also, before I saw the word written down, I thought it was spelled "Calhoun".)

I then killed some time in a Starbucks, managing to speak Chinese to the cashier. After that my next job was to find the Peninsula hotel in the Tsim Sha Tsui area. I was supposed to meet up with one of Jen's friends there to see Batman: The Dark Knight. I sat there reading my new book for about an hour, but they didn't show up. (I heard later that their plans changed while at Disneyland.) So I was on my own for dinner. I took the subway to Causeway Bay and went out of a random exit. I walked around a little bit before finding a Yunnan noodle shop. I sat down and ordered, speaking again in Mandarin, and ate myself some damn good spicy noodles. The shop had the TV on and the station was playing Liu Xiang's unceremonious exit from the Olympics. The sound was off, so I didn't understand what was happening. I only knew that he looked like he'd injured himself. I'd heard rumors a week or so ago that he was injured, so I figured that's what had happened, and sure enough, it was.

After dinner I took the subway back to the Shun Tak centre, briefly considered flying in a helicopter back to Macau, changed my mind when I saw it was over $2000 HKD, bought a ticket for the ferry instead, and settled in to read and nap on the way back to Macau. It was probably about 6:30 or 7.

I arrived in Macau at around 8 or 8:30 and looked around for a place to exchange my HKD back into patacas, but couldn't find one. Very strange. So I hopped in a cab and said "Casa Real", the name of my hotel, expecting it to work like last time. The driver didn't recognize the name, but I pulled out my map and told him the street name and number in Chinese. That didn't work though, because he dropped me off in the very center of the peninsula, on the road I wanted but pretty far from where the hotel was.

Initially discouraged, I instead realized this was the perfect time to take pictures of Macau's neon insanity that I view as a certain nose-thumbing to the Vegas strip. I was surrounded by bright neon lights, flashing bulbs, and signs promising me untold wealth if only I'd wager some money on their blackjack tables. Here now, a glimpse:



That's the Grand Lisboa, the unquestioned centerpiece of Macau's skyline. I read somewhere the ball at the base is supposed to resemble a pearl, and the building itself is like water shooting up from the pearl. Or something. To me it looks like an egg that's exploding.







Deep breath ... just a couple more!





Whew.

Then I wandered over to another nearby section and noticed that one casino had a two-story TV on the side that was showing the US vs. Germany basketball game.



So I sat down and watched for about 20 minutes, during which I also text-messaged my German friend and made fun of his country's ability to play basketball.

Then I began the long walk back to my hotel. I saw a cool pedestrian bridge that was lit up in an interesting way.



And I tried to sneak a picture of a guy who was sneaking a cigarette, but he turned and caught me at the last second:



At some point, I reached my hotel, tired and sweaty and disheveled from walking around all day and night.

Whew!

If I missed posting any HK pictures, and I know I did, the full set is here.

I don't know if I'll get to post about the subsequent morning in Macau, because tomorrow evening I am leaving for Huangshan and I won't have Internet access there. But I promise that at some point, I'll post about my remaining time in Macau -- although the next couple days after I return will likely be filled with Huangshan posts and pictures!!

Visit to Macau, Day 1

Sunday morning bright and eary (actually, just early, it wasn't bright yet) I hopped on the MagLev to the airport and then to Macau. Macau is part of China now but considered a Special Administrative Region (SAR) after the handover from Portugal. The upshot of this is that internationally speaking, you have to leave China to enter Macau. This means that I had to go through immigration on both departure and arrival. So that's what I did.

Flying into Macau, I could see the amazing blue, puffy-cloud-filled skies. The peninsula and its islands are at the southernmost tip of China, way closer to the equator than Shanghai, so the tropical feel was to be expected. It was so tropical, in fact, that when I got off the plane and took out my camera, the lens and LCD screen were fogged up! I had to wipe them off with my shirt to take a picture.

After that, a cab pulled up and I got inside. My first thought: the driver's on the right side! Holy shit! I've never seen that before. But yes, in Macau (and Hong Kong also) they drive on the left side of the road. It's so different. I entered the car on the left side. Oncoming traffic was on my right, not on my left. Very strange. Obviously the drivers and residents are used to it. But not me! It was great.

Proof:





Macau is on the sea (probably even moreso than Shanghai, whose name literally means "on the sea") and and stretches across several islands (Taipa, Cotai) and the main peninsula that's attached to mainland China. So on the ride in from the airport, we crossed over numerous bridges, which again is pretty cool to me. All these intricate stone ropy constructions to get you from one place to another. I recall hearing about a family member of mine who was scared of bridges; not me. I love them. And I especially love them when the skies are blue, the air feels like the beach, and you've just arrived in a brand new destination.



Cities on the water look cool to me. I can't figure out why. I think it's because you have flat expanses of water edging up against towering skyscrapers, creating an extreme contrast in elevation. I think it's the contrast that I find intriguing. Macau and Hong Kong have that in spades.

Being a former Portuguese colony, Macau's maps and street signs all have Portuguese (in addition to Chinese and English) on them. This is a welcome sight as that langauge is superficially similar to Spanish, which I vaguely recall from two years in 7th-8th grade and three years living in Austin. So I know what "salida" means on a sign, even if it wasn't right next to the word "Exit" (or even the Chinese 出口, which I can read also. Happy days. An example of the tri-language signs:



However, most Macau natives speak neither Portuguese nor English, but Cantonese, which is an official language. Some might speak Mandarin also, moreso now than when Macau was controlled by Portugal, but it's overwhelmingly Cantonese. So right off the bat you've got four languages you're dealing with: English, Portuguese, Cantonese, and Chinese (Mandarin).

On my hotel's web site, they give the address as being on "Avenido do Dr. Rodrigo Rodrigues." So I assumed that I would be able to tell this to the cabbie and be on my merry way. No such luck. He didn't understand. I had a map with me that had the Chinese name of the street, so I figured with that plus the number, we would be good, but either my cabbie didn't read Chinese or he didn't know where it was. Luckily I mentioned the name of the hotel (in Portuguese, but it's simple, Casa Real), and the cabbie knew, so off we went.

I arrived at the hotel, checked in, and found my room in short order. I walked down two flights of stairs and knocked on Jen's door, and she came out. It's been 8 or 9 years since I've seen her, so we spent a little while catching up. She told me her friends were going to the Cirque de Soleil show Zaia, so I tagged along. Jen is touring China with a production of The Sound of Music, so I met some of the cast as they joined us. We walked over to The Sands:





From there we caught a free bus to The Venetian (where Zaia was playing). On the bus, Jen and I talked about what I should do on Monday. Her and some friends were leaving Macau at 7:30 AM to catch the ferry to Hong Kong and from there to HK Disneyland. I had no desire to go to Disneyland and had been planning to stay in Macau and do touristy things. But Jen convinced me that, in the couple days her and her company had been in Macau, they'd run through all the touristy things and that there wasn't so much to do, or at the very least, not much interesting stuff. After some discussion, I decided to go to Hong Kong with them, but just break off and do my own thing for the day.

We ate a late lunch at McSorley's, an Irish pub in the Venetian, watched some of the Olympics, chatted a bit, and then headed out to the show. It was pretty interesting. I liked all the clowns and the breakdancing green robot :-) I didn't take any pictures though because I wanted to enjoy the show, oh, and also because at this upper-class resort the ushers actually prevent you from taking pictures. (Not so at many other places in China.)

After the show, I joined Jen and some other kids for dinner inside The Sands. I was in Las Vegas once about four and a half years ago, and it felt exactly like what I felt like in Macau. Grand, sweeping displays of opulence, all ignored while people sit at blackjack, roulette, poker, so so many other kinds of games. We had to thread our way between slot machines and gamers to get to the cafeteria. I wonder why the gambling industry feels compelled to dress itself up in neon and put on this show of luxury? Maybe because people with a lot of money like to gamble?

After dinner, we headed over to the Macau Cultural Center. Jen left to get ready for the show, and I found my seat and settled in to enjoy the performance. I had never seen The Sound of Music, but now know that I've heard a number of its songs. (Especially The Vandals' cover of "So Long, Farewell.") I really liked the show; especially the historical context of being set in Austria before the German annexation in the run-up to WWII. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. I wonder how much of that context was known to the Macauian (is that the proper term? Macauite? Macauvian? In Chinese it's easy; you just add 人 to a place name to denote its denizens, so these people would be 澳门人 or Aomenren) audience.

No matter: the performance was sold out (like most of the Macau performances have been, I learned), and the audience hung on every word. They laughed at the appropriate times and I even heard a couple people singing/humming along with the songs. The entire script was projected on either side of the stage during the audience, both spoken words and song -- whereas, during the Beijing opera performance, only the song lyrics were projected on the wall. During intermission, I took this picture of The Sands at night:



On the right-hand and bottom-left sides, you can kind of see how my camera lens was all steamed up.

After the show, we went back to the hotel. It was someone's fake birthday, so there was cake and a small get-together/party in someone's room. I met some members of the cast, including the guy who played Rolf and the guy who played Max, and some of the stagehand crew. It was pretty interesting talking to the actors and getting their perceptions of China. Obviously some of their experiences are vastly different from mine. They've been travelling around the country and have visited tons of cities like Chengdu, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and so on. They haven't had to learn much Chinese, as they've got interpreters with them (or they will hire different ones in every they visit, I'm not sure). However, some of their experiences are quite the same, including many of the cultural and sociological differences that separate China from the United States. Anyhoo, talking to them was pretty neat.

I hung out for a little while, ate some cake, and then went to bed. I'd agreed to get up at 6:45 in order to eat breakfast at 7 and leave the hotel by 7:30 to spent the day in Hong Kong.

Tomorrow: Hong Kong by day and Macau by night. You can cheat a little bit and look at the full Macau picture set.