Macau is Colorful

A year or so ago, I met with some friends in Hong Kong, and took a day-trip over to the former Portuguese colony of Macau, right across the bay. I was really taken with the city, and decided to come back sooner, rather than later.

I had a vacation a while ago, and headed right back over! Once again I enjoyed the city, it's very beautiful with excellent food. It's become my favorite Chinese city, with certain qualifications. I could go on and on about the city, instead I'll just limit this post to snapshots that show how colorful - or at least pastel - the city's architecture can be.


The city's historic downtown center is mostly buildings that are painted a canary yellow, and at night the area is colored with a bright yellow light. It's a fun area with a lot of shops and also a lot of side-streets full of restaurants. Most of Macau's many churches are also painted yellow:



When I was walking around one night, I came across a huge group of teenagers in some kind of lion-dancing practice. Very cool, in Shanghai I never see anything like that:



Just wandering the streets is a lot of fun, especially in the older areas which are painted all shades of pastel, with all the paint faded. There's also a banyan tree in this picture, it anchors a small plaza-esque park.




Neighborhoods could turn into some kind of apartment psychedelia, with every respective apartment complex given an intense, clashing pastel coloring. I also liked how Macau is built on a series of hills, and I was constantly walking up or down a hill. It's what I'm used to, whereas Shanghai is totally flat.



Macau was considered something of a slum until the last ten years, a lot of the buildings from the more modern colonial period look a little like they're concrete boxes that are falling apart. But from the outside, they still have an interesting, distinctive look to them, and often a pastel paint that is just barely visible behind all the fading. I think buildings like this explain why Hong Kong's buildings are all tiled - the hot humidity wreaks havoc on anything else.



The Portuguese influence is obvious throughout, it's also on the street signs, which are in both traditional-character Chinese and in Portuguese. A lot of menus and public notices were the same way. Shanghai uses modern characters rather than traditional, and I can get by in Spanish, so I sometimes found myself cross-referencing the Portuguese and Chinese to get at the meaning of things! Also I sometimes had waiters and waitresses try to speak to me in Portuguese.



There were older, somewhat deteriorating but extremely beautiful neighborhoods of brick buildings, it reminded me of a less crowded version of Shanghai's shikumen - interesting to walk by, quaint to the point of being beautiful, but I wouldn't want to buy that kind of house.



I said that I liked Macau, but with certain qualifications? Macau seems like a very sleepy city, I suspect it's a better place to visit than to live. And as a Mandarin speaker in Shanghai, I found it difficult to understand the traditional characters, and impossible to use Cantonese. Although people I ran across almost always understood Mandarin, a lot of people could only respond in Cantonese, and very few people knew English.

Quick Impressions of Macau

I dropped by Macau for half a day when I was in Hong Kong, and make no mistake: Macau is without doubt the most beautiful city in the Chinese diasphora. The reasons aren't entirely Chinese, in fact I think a lot of the beauty comes from looking like the stereotype of a South American colonial period city. In reality, Macau was a Portugese colony until 7 years ago. It's just a normal street scene, but check out the faded pastel colors, the flat fronting, the rounded edges, even the ad for Fanta soda:



More directly, the old city center had a definite Iberian look to it. While the current population is only 2% Portugese people, the buildings are definitely in a mixed style, and a lot of the civic buildings, and historical buildings, look straight Portugese. Macau is also the only place I've seen haole kids, speaking Chinese - I noticed it a few times. In the PRC there's no native white population, in Hong Kong everyone's speaking English anyway.



This tourist center was anchored by the remnants of a cathedral which burnt down more than 150 years ago. Only the facade remains. If you zoom in on the above picture, you can see 9 headed dragons, skeletons relaxing, saints being tortured, and so forth.



The food! I'm a big fan of both Portuguese and Macanese food. While I wasn't in Macau for very long, I'll admit I ate more than my fair share, and I was very impressed. First was a simple Portugese place I ran across, Restaurante Escada. Nothing amazing, but very solid and delicious. It was in a charming building in a charming little alley:



The street food was also out in force, with a lot of places giving away a sample of the food they were selling.



I also had one of Macau's famous pork chop sandwiches from a chain store, along with an iced and sweetened ginger tea. You can see a lady holding up a plastic tray as I took the picture. She thought this was the funniest thing, and laughed for a long time afterward. In general I found the shopkeepers, workers, and people I ran into on the street, all to be extremely friendly in Macau.




There were some beautiful parks I wandered around, very well maintained and well used, with lots of plants and statues. This one was located on a hillside looking over the city, and you got the panoramic view of what was going on below, as well as a good spying position on some old men, sitting around and playing cards:




As with Hong Kong, it seemed like not only did every single store have its own miniature shrine, there were also a lot of shrines located in alleyways, at parks, around the corner where you can't really see it, etc. A friend tried praying at one, I haven't heard yet if it helped.



It's really not my thing, but I'd be amiss to not at least mention gambling in Macau. Most of Asia doesn't allow Casino type gambling, while Macau does. For the last few years, Macau has been in a mini economic boom, partly driven by an influx of Vegas-branded casinos. We wandered past casino after casino which looked like it was just about ready to open, and the Sands opened not too long ago.

More On Hong Kong

I've already had my word to say on Hong Kong, both the central island of Hong Kong, and the hipper Kowloon. While I visited very briefly before, this time I was around for a week. I was there to meet friends from California, one of whom was born & raised in Hong Kong. I learned a little more, saw a few new things, and here are a few pictures.

First, I didn't mention in my last postings about the Peak. All the Hong Kong gangster movies have some point where the gangsters meet up on remote hills overlooking the city to discuss something nefarious. I went up to the Peak to have a look, twice on the same day: I sort of wandered up the mid-level escalators and then hiked there the first time, and then that night I took a train. Either at night or day, it's very beautiful.



My parents had been to Hong Kong briefly, about five years before, and had commented that it reminded them of Honolulu. Other people have told me that's balderdash, but certain parts of Hong Kong definitely felt like Honolulu to me, with the semi-tropical climate, and the hills balancing themself off against high-rises. That was especially true in Aberdeen, which wasn't quite as built up as the central districts of Hong Kong. There was a whole lot of boats, it gave the impression of being a small fishing village long since overrun by an expanding Hong Kong.



On the back side of Hong Kong Island is a series of beaches that almost feel remote. The beaches themselves aren't all that much, but with the dramatic cliffs and mountains leading ride up to the oceanside, many of them are beautiful. I stopped at Stanley, which had a lot of charm despite being overwhelmed by tourists, and in the middle of a construction project that blocked off direct ocean views for much of the area.



There's a few other things I want to mention. First, Hong Kong people seem to be way superstitious and religious compared to Shanghai people. Most interesting to me was, buildings didn't have floors that ended in 4, which sounds like "death" in Chinese. So, no 14th floor, 24th floor, etc., although there are 43rd floors. Also, there were little shrines everywhere, such as this one, by the side of an alleyway:



I wasn't quite as impressed with the food in Hong Kong this time: some of the food I had was truly delicious, but it was really hit and miss, even between dishes in indivisual restaurants. I ended up eating plenty dim sum: while you can find the elements of a dim sum meal in Shanghai, recognizable dim sum restaurants are rare here. In Hong Kong there were a bunch of them. Very delicious, although these meals went on for hours, almost beating the record 4-hour lunch I once had in France. They were similar in food and style to what I got in downtown Oakland:



On transportation: huh. It's doubtlessly better than Shanghai's, and I was particularly impressed with the 45 minute train between Kowloon and Shenzhen (it's much cheaper to fly from Shanghai to nearby Shenzhen). But Hong Kong's terrain is more irregular and crowded than Shanghai, so at times getting about took much longer than I felt it should take. Of note, there's a bunch of double-decker trolleys, they only cost a quarter and are pretty convenient along Hong Kong island's downtown. There's also double-decker busses, during rush hour they are packed solid:



There's ferrys between the islands, that have essentially been replaced by subways connecting Hong Kong Island to Kowloon. The ferry building is getting replaced, and the ferry service downgraded. While it was a short trip, the water was surprisingly rough.



Overall I was not as impressed with Hong Kong as I was the previous time, mostly because I feel it lacks any scene, or things to do besides shop and get drunk - and I didn't do either. I'll have more to say later about the nearby state of Macau - where I didn't go gambling!

I Love Hong Kong: Kowloon Edition

I've said my piece about Hong Kong's Hong Kong Island. Hong Kong Island was great and very scenic, I really enjoyed it. As much as I liked it, though, I thought the Kowloon district was much, much better. I can definitely imagine living there in the future.

The first thing I noticed was the Kowloon is much more international than Shanghai. There's a variety of different nationalities, at a quick look I noticed large numbers of Indians and Pakistania, Americans, British, Thais, and Filipinos. I don't want to claim it's some multi-racial paradise - it seems like there's essentially no integration to Hong Kong, you won't see a table of Indians and Chinese and Haoles sitting together. However it did lead to a larger variety of sites than in Shanghai. For instance, Indian women were all wearing traditional Indian clothing, kind of interesting. The picture on the left shows a storefront window for such clothes, and you also saw Indian restaurants, Indian stores, and this rather large mosque:



OK to bring up stereotypes: having lived in the SF Bay Area, with Indian American friends, I think of Southern Asians as likely being involved in the IT field, and fairly wealthy. It was kind of strange to see South Asians as the ghetto-ized underclass to the city. When I wandered what seemed to be the center of Kowloon's Indian population, I was offered drugs time after time, and to be honest the area seemed a little scary. So why did I wander the area?



Yes that's right, it's the same "Chungking" that lent its name to Wong Kar Wai's 3rd best movie (after the amazing "Days of Being Wild" and "In the Mood For Love"). It increased my respect for the movie, especially the first half - walking around the apartments and the surrounding area, I basically sensed like I was wandering through the movie, a distinctively strange feeling.

Like in the movie, the bottom floor of the apartment complex was a crowded and confused series of markets, and the upper floors were apartments. I didn't go up to have a look, but I suspect the apartments are overly cramped, and not entirely nice places to live. To an extent this is true throughout Kowloon. The apartments look cheap and a little old, although I'm sure they're still quite expensive. Hong Kong is extremely dense, even compared to Shanghai or, say, New York City.



But I love population density! There's always people around, and more explicitly it allows stores and restaurants that couldn't exist if I was living out in the outskirts of Oahu or somewhere. Overhanging signs illuminate the streets even late at night, and there's entire avenues full of restaurants, I took these pictures around ten at night. Late night restaurants are common to Shanghai and exist in any large city, but there's nothing like this anywhere else I've been:



An easy criticism about Hong Kong is, it can feel like wandering around a shopping mall. Kowloon wasn't as bad at the constant boutique stores of Hong Kong Island, but it still could get repetitive. Not that Shanghai doesn't have its fair share of convenience stores or places selling cell phones, but it seemed like Kowloon had one store after another, selling the same crap you could buy three storefronts away. More encouraging though, was the repeated storefronts selling BBQ meats:



I didn't have as many meals in Hong Kong as I would have liked, but the food I had was simply amazing. While they have BBQ meats in Shanghai, I don't think they're so great, I prefer what I got in Oakland. But, the BBQ meat I had in Hong Kong was very tasty. And, while I'm not the biggest noodle fan, I was in a hurry and popped into an unassuming chain noodle joint to get a quick cheap bowl of noodles. I got Sichuan style noodles, it was a little rich with hot oil and a surprisingly strong taste of peanuts. It was only a bite or two later that I realized it was the most delicious bowl of noodles I had ever eaten in my life. It was so good I wanted to cry.

I Love Hong Kong: Hong Kong Island Edition

I'm recently returned from a very short trip to Hong Kong, and I must admit that I totally loved the city. Where to begin? Howsabout the place where I first got dropped off, Hong Kong Island. The comparison is less than complete, but in many ways Hong Kong Island is to Hong Kong, what Manhattan is to New York City.



When I came in by bus, as shown above, I was extremely surprised both at the density of skyscrapers, and the obvious wealth and design to many of them. It's immediately apparent that there is much, much more money in Hong Kong than in Shanghai. This was hammered in by something silly but kind of cool: free Internet terminals inside the subway station!

In Shanghai, when I told people I was going to Hong Kong, the inevitable next statement was that it was a shopper's heaven. That might be true, but I wasn't looking to buy anything. In the two products I was keeping an eye out for, shoes large enough to fit me and a larger selection of spirits than that available in Shanghai, I came up empty. Anyway Hong Kong has one boutique store after the next boutique store, and parts of Hong Kong Island reminded me, in many ways, of the area around Union Square in San Francisco, hills and architecture and all.



As in San Francisco, but even more so, these hills just keep going on and on, and are quite steep. It's extremely pictaresque, but not many rich boutique stores would want to locate so high up. To address this, there's a huge linked series of outdoor escalators running up the side of the hill, from the shops to the apartment buildings at the very top. Although the cobblestones streets are so beautiful, it's tempting to walk.



Let me say a little more: these escalators just keep going and going. You rapidly get pretty high up taking these escalators. One pleasant surprise was that as opposed to Shanghai, where people think nothing of blocking off both sides of the escalator, in Hong Kong people stopped on the right side and kept walking on the left. The other huge contrasts I noted is that cars very rarely honked their horns, and I didn't see anybody spit. I guess Hong Kong has a more developed city culture, Shanghai is still booming with recent arrivals.



The escalators took breaks at side streets that were obvious hang-outs for Hong Kong's large foreigner population. Many of the bars and restaurants didn't have any Chinese people in them, aside from the people working the tables. Shanghai has a range of foreign food, but Hong Kong's easily eclipsed it. On the other hand, from my very limited experience of eating at a single Mexican restaurant in Hong Kong, the foreign food is just as bad as Shanghai's.



While Hong Kong Island was dominated by malls, department stores, and boutique shops, there were a number of extremely packed side-streets, where Chinese and immigrant Asians sold clothing and a range of other products.



I chose to go to Shanghai for valid reasons that remain valid, but I wonder if I should have done things a little differently. I have to admit I think Hong Kong blows away Shanghai in some regards. I definitely hope to visit again, for a longer time. Over the next month I'll have more to say on Hong Kong, so stay tuned.