Macao - wow!

Last Thursday we went with Paul’s colleague Zhou Mi to Macao, which is just south of Zhuhai.  The three of us took a cab from our apartment to the Gongbei Port leading to Macao, and joined the crowds exiting Zhuhai and walking through the passage to Macao.  People cross the border both for work and for gambling.  Macao has been returned from Portugal to China since the Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration of 1999, but is guaranteed 50 years as a primarily autonomous region.  Macao has its own currency, police, legal system and customs/immigration control, while China retains control of Macao’s defense and foreign affairs.

Upon exiting immigration control in Macao, we took a free shuttle bus to the Grand Lisboa Casino downtown.  This was not to gamble, but 1) to make use of this free transportation service, provided by the casinos to encourage gambling, and 2) to see the magnificent historical treasures in the lobby of the Grand Lisboa.  Stanley Ho, the owner of this casino, is very rich, and has collected many fascinating treasures and displayed some of them in the casino/hotel lobby.  We saw one of the original twelve zodiac bronze figureheads from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, for which he reportedly paid about $10 million US.  There were several carvings from old tusks, pieces of jade, metal sculpture with gold leaf, and other magnificent pieces of art.

Grand Lisboa casino/hotel, central Macao

 

We exited the casino and stopped at a café for “pasteis de nata”, Portuguese egg-custard pastries that are still made as a local specialty in Macao, even though there are relatively few Portuguese people left here.   They’ve made their way onto mainland China, and we’ll be sampling more before we leave – they’re very good!  We wandered the small streets for a while – unlike China’s large avenues, the streets in Macao were made quite narrow in the Portuguese days and have remained that way.

We visited two religious sites from the Portuguese years.  One is the small St. Dominic’s church, in good shape though built in the late 1500’s.  The second is the more famous ruins of the church of St. Paul, left with only its façade standing after a fire in the 1800s.  This is near the modern Museum of Macau, where we viewed a number of well-constructed exhibits on the Portuguese/Chinese interaction throughout the past.  Perhaps the most interesting exhibit was one showing cockroaches - people used to bet on cockroach fights, and good fighting cockroaches were greatly respected, to the point of having funerals for the cockroaches after they died.

Ruins of St. Paul's

St. Dominic's Church

Cricket casket, preserved fighting crickets, cricket crypt

We visited two small Buddhist temples.  There were no monks at these temples; rather, the temples are maintained by volunteers who sell incense, paper money and other items to honor various gods and to bring a good afterlife to deceased relatives.

 

We took another casino shuttle bus to the newer area of Tapia.  Here we walked to a set of old Portuguese houses that are transformed into a museum, saw Portuguese and Chinese workers setting up for a weekend festival, and walked through a small garden on the edge of a wetland, preserved in the midst of a large cluster of casino/hotels.

 

To end our day, we visited two more casinos – the City of Dreams and the Venetian.  We walked through one of the casino floors with all its bright lights and clanging bells, but saved our money for another day.  Just seeing the huge buildings and lavish interiors was interesting enough for our visit.  There were a few people here dressed in Halloween costumes, which made us feel a little at home.  We took a final shuttle bus back to the border, and crossed back into Zhuhai.

Casinos in newer Tapia area

 

Canals and gondolas inside the Venetian

Garden display inside City of Dreams

Dragon at City of Dreams

Food in Zhuhai

Part of the reason we like to travel is to be able to see and eat different foods.  Eating has been a bit of a challenge for us in Zhuhai, being vegetarian and not being able to read most food tags or restaurant menus.  We also have limited cooking facilities in our apartment, with 2 gas burners, 2 skillets, 1 sauce pan (which we bought), 2 reasonably sharp kitchen knives, 2 cleavers and a cutting board. We shop at two grocery stores, a covered fresh market and some street markets within a mile or so of our apartment, and no one speaks English at any of them.  Still, we’ve been able to eat remarkably well.

It’s fun to wander through the markets.  Some of the items we’ve seen are: all sorts of fruits and vegetables, tofu, chunks of meat, fish heads, live chickens, ducks, turtles, frogs, other seafood, eels and some live songbirds.  Other areas of the market have clothes, shoes, towels, and kitchen items.  The markets are perhaps the most the most colorful and lively places we visit.

 

Variety of eggs - the black ones on the right are fermented

Dragonfruit and other interesting fruits

Our regular tofu ("doufu" in Chinese) vendor

We hope the back pots contain some sort of morel mushrooms and not brains...

When eating at a Chinese restaurant, the food is ordered for the table and served family style.  Bowls of food, generally with only one or a few ingredients, are brought out, and everyone shares the same food.  After our last trip to China we had become quite accomplished with chopsticks, and I think we have impressed our current hosts.

This region (Guangdong) is known for mushrooms, and lots of fresh and dried mushrooms are for sale.  On one of our first days here, we went for lunch with some university faculty at the local Mushroom Restaurant.  Mushrooms of all kinds, prepared many ways, came to the table.  At one point the server added raw mushrooms to boiling liquid in the middle of the table.  We ate other dishes as they were brought, then the server scooped out the now-cooked mushrooms into bowls for each of us.  Other types of mushrooms plus tofu were added several times and eventually we were served mushroom soup.  The whole meal was very good.

Eating at the Mushroom Restaurant

Many types of mushrooms at the markets

We had an adventure trying to find two vegetarian restaurants that we’d found out about online.  We got to the first address, but found a huge new building being constructed on the site.  We then walked to a second address, and found a restaurant but not a vegetarian one.  Still, we used our guidebook to show them the phrase “I am a vegetarian” and the waitress immediately understood.  She helped us choose several tasty vegetarian dishes, including an eggplant/green bean combination and some leek dumplings.

What we found at the address of a small local vegetarian restaurant

Food at second restaurant

We have also seen some unusual food products.  We went on an outing with our friends to a theme park in Zhuhai recreating the old and destroyed Yuen Ming palace (old summer palace) in Beijing. We saw a man making, or more accurately, drawing, caramelized sugar suckers on a marble slab, and another man crushing sugar cane to make cane juice (we tried this juice - it was quite tasty). We've also seen a few food-related signs that might have suffered in translation.

Turning sugar cane into drink

Yesterday we walked by a local seafood restaurant.  You could come out to tanks in front of the restaurant and pick out your fresh meal.  This restaurant also had some of the friendliest workers we've met.

Tanks at seafood restaurant for fresh food

 

After eating at several local restaurants and cooking somewhat Chinese style (rice or noodles, plus veggies, tofu and some nuts or sauce) for a week, we decided we needed a little variety.  On Sunday night we made French toast, and Paul washed it down with the local Haizhu beer.

The fruit and veggie contents of our refrigerator

An average dinner at our apartment

French toast and beer for a change