defrog: (air travel)
Wrapping up our coverage of my two-day trip to Macau earlier this week.

Here’s how Tuesday went.

macau

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
defrog: (air travel)
Continuing our coverage of my two-day trip to Macau earlier this week.

Here’s what else we did on Monday.

macau

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

defrog: (air travel)
So the bridal unit and I spent Monday and Tuesday in Macau, which we’ve been to a several times before – it’s only an hour down the Guangdong coast by high-speed jetfoil, after all – but my last few trips were mostly job-related. So it was a chance to take a few hundred pictures and dump them on Photobukkit for yr amusement.

For beginners, Macau is comprised of three parts: the main city and two islands (Taipa and Coloane), as well as the Cotai Strip that sits between Taipa and Coloane where water used to be.

Macau looks the way it does because it was a Portuguese colony until 1999 when Portugal gave it back to China under a similar “special administrative region” arrangement as Hong Kong (which basically means we get to run our own affairs but China owns the pink slip). It also looks the way it does because the major industry in gambling – Macau is a casino town, and ever since Stanley Ho lost his monopoly, Vegas bigwigs have moved in to establish familiar-sounding names like Sands, Wynn, The Venetian and the MGM Grand.

The result: half the city looks like a Portugal/China mashup, and the other half looks like the set of Ocean’s 11. Or a Hunter Thompson novel.

Anyway, I’ll break it down into three photosets, starting with this one: shots around Taipa Village, a stone’s throw away from the hotel.

macau

Pretty self-explanatory, more or less. Except for the panda, which I’m not too sure about.

PRODUCTION NOTE: Clicking the mosaic takes you to the entire photo set. So, you know, make plans.

Up next: Fear, loathing and dragons in the Hard Rock Casino!

Village idiot,

This is dF

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