MADE IN MACAU PART 2: FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE HARD ROCK CASINO

Continuing our coverage of my two-day trip to Macau earlier this week.

Here’s what else we did on Monday.



We didn’t spend much time in the casinos – we’re not really gamblers, KT and I, because we know better. But we did go to the new City Of Dreams, which is a complex comprising three new hotels/casinos – the Grand Hyatt, the Crown Towers and (of course) the Hard Rock Hotel.

We only went there because we wanted to hop the free shuttle bus to the old pier so we could catch another free shuttle bus to our hotel. And we only ended up in the Hard Rock Casino because we attended the free Dragon’s Treausure show in The Bubble (like a planetarium, but with a dragon theme, based on the premise that the City Of Dreams was built on the remains of the legendary Jade Emperor's Palace, etc), which entitled us to play the Dragon Slots tournament (play the slots for two minutes, ten highest scores win shopping vouchers).

We didn’t win anything, but I did get to see Mick Mars’ boots. FTW!

Anyway, we spent part of Monday night walking around the Fisherman’s Wharf, which is a new waterfront area with lots of buildings reflecting a range of architecture that starts with the Babylon Casino and ends with a replica of Beijing’s Forbidden City.

So it’s like Disneyland without rides. Or Disney characters. Which is both good and bad.

One thing of note was the War Games attraction, in which you can get groups of friends together to shoot the hell out of each other with BB guns. You can also do straight target practice. The bridal unit and I went for the latter option. All I can say is you’d never know I was once qualified to shoot real guns by the US Army (though in my defense, it’s been 20 years since I fired a real gun – but then KT has never shot a real gun in her life and she was shooting like Martin Riggs).

Anyway, the most interesting thing about it was that it was decorated to look like a Middle Eastern training camp, with lots of Iraqi flags and gravel pathways and newspaper articles about Osama bin Laden on the walls. No sure how Muslim tourists will feel about that.

And so much for the Fishmerman’s Wharf. We ended the evening on a high note, though – a fantastic dinner at a Portuguese restaurant (of which there are many in Macau) – specifically, the Dragon restaurant a few side streets away from Senado Square in the old city. Lamb chops, baked duck rice, cheese bread and local Sangres beer. ZOMG excellent food.

Up next: In search of art!

Good eatin’,

This is dF

MADE IN MACAU PART 3: WE HUNT ART SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

Wrapping up our coverage of my two-day trip to Macau earlier this week.

Here’s how Tuesday went.



We spent the day in the old part of town in and around the St Lazarus Church district in search of a really obscure art gallery that was showcasing manga art and a cosplay gallery, among other things. We ended up kicking around the side streets off Rua de Campo that led us to a really picturesque neighborhood where buildings 90 years old have been transformed into residences and art galleries.

We had lunch in one of them, the Albergue Gallery (the one with the fuzzy trees, above), though the food (Italian) was average. The art was better – a collection of Rui Rasquinho’s illustrations to Sunpin’s The Art Of War (Sunpin being Sun Tzu’s decendent who wrote his own Art Of War as a companion piece to Sun Tzu’s writing).

Like this.



The gallery we were looking for – 10 Fantasia (the one with the art pigs out front) – turned out to be just up the stairs. Inside we found some nifty stuff inside from local artists that wasn’t groundbreaking, but worth the effort to find.

The other highlight was getting sidetracked into a local bookstore, where I found a cheap copy of Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi. The best part was when the bridal unit, who had been perusing the Chinese-language books (many of which are translations of English-language books) came up and asked me if I was familiar with Neil Gaiman. She’d seen a book called Anansi Boys and thought it sounded cool. I assured her it was.

And so much for Macau. Exhausting trip, but time well spent.

In the bag,

This is dF

OPEN YOUR SESAME

Now on English Russia: a fine collection Soviet Russian album covers.

My personal favorites:

 

 

Not that the West has any room to snicker, mind. And we can’t even blame them on Communism.

Have fun trying to figure out which Western 80s artist was an influence on the Russians. There's definitely a Falco in there somewhere.

My nautilus is pompilius,

This is dF

THE 80S ARE ALL RIGHT IF YOU LIKE SAXOPHONES

It’s often trendy to put down the 80s in terms of music, but there’s a lot of good music to be had from that time, and I don’t just mean LA hardcore punk or college radio staples like REM and The Replacements. And every decade has its fair share of cheesy music that doesn’t age well.

In the case of the 80s, for my money the main problem wasn’t the hair or the clothes or the British accents – it was the gratuitous sax solos.

A pretty definitive list is here.

PRODUCTION NOTE: Some of the songs on the list are actually pretty good. Still, that’s probably more sax than we needed. And that's not including Kenny G.

Best gratuitous sax solo? That'd be Fear.

Let’s talk about sax,

This is dF