Hong Kong in October, Part 4

Squid for Breakfast and a Hooker Convention

October 19

We went went up an alley called Gilman’s Bazaar near the 88 Hotel and found a congee shop where Joanna ordered squid for breakfast. I later learned that it was tang tsai chok, or sampan congee, made with squid bits, pork, and aged egg. It was very good, even better I think than the congee we ate a couple of days earlier. Rice gruel absorbs the flavor of whatever you put in it.

Then I got two coffees to go at Affinity Cafe. There is no coffee, at least in our part of Hong Kong, before 7 a.m. The Capo’s Espresso doesn’t open till 7:30.

We didn’t do much, wandered a bit, packed, read the paper back at the hotel. Then we took a cab to the Macau ferry.

We sat down for lunch at a restaurant called Lan Fong Yuen in the terminal. Joanna looked at the menu and started laughing. One dish is described in English as fried egg, bolognese sauce, and chow mein over white rice. In Chinese it is yin yan gwei lo fan. That’s yin and yang white devil rice. I had to have that, and I ate it with a fork.

All they had was Carlsberg beer, and the waiter had to say it. An “r” and an “l” together (let alone two more consonants right behind that) is as difficult for the Chinese to say as it is for a Yankee to pronounce the diphthong in “heung.”

It’s an hour boat ride in the jet ferry from H.K. to Macau. It takes you past the Kowloon peninsula. At one point there is a small harbor, sheltered by jetties. Joanna told me it’s where the small boats at Aberdeen can go for protection during typhoons. Part of the voyage to Macau crosses the South China Sea, but I didn’t see any pirate junks.

The signs here can be a bit of a trial at times. A man at the welcome desk told us to go outside and turn left to get the bus to the Lisboa. OK, there are signs. We followed them: went down elevator, followed more signs. No bus. “Where?” we ask a lady who was tending the bus for the Galaxy Hotel. She points. “But there’s nothing up there.” We thought she meant the other end of the road we were on. She meant back the way we came.

Seems we were supposed to ignore the posted signs and make a sharp left toward the girl hidden around the corner holding the Lisboa sign.

Next bit of confusion: There are two Lisboas. The van pulled up in front of one, and before I could get out, Joanna was told in Cantonese that this was the wrong hotel. The taxi had to drive about six blocks, around a traffic circle, up an avenue, through hell and back to get across the street to the other one, the Grand Lisboa. 

This is like all the challenging parts of driving in Queens, Philadelphia, and Boston all at once. Let a professional do it.

                                    Grand Lisboa.

We get to the desk and are told that no, we belong in the first one, the regular Lisboa, after all. This time we followed a bellman through a tunnel.

                                   Standard Lisboa.

I don’t count either of these events as getting lost, because in looking for the bus we followed signs and in hotel mixup I wasn’t driving. But if you don’t get lost, you are not traveling hard enough, so I was working on it.

The hotel lodged us in high-roller territory. The bed in my room looked like the one Henry VIII so often used in “The Tudors.”

The bathrooom was just about as fantasy-inducing. I really liked the octopus mosaic in front of the toilet.

We unpacked and went for a walk. There is a strange-looking park full of glass structures--think of the Sydney opera house if it was made of windows--in the island of the traffic circle by the hotel. Weird, useless, unusual--it was my kind of place. So how do we get there? We could try to run through a break in the nearly endless stream of buses, motorbikes, and taxis. I’d give us a good 30 percent chance of survival, too.

Then I notice more glass structures, but these are on our side of the highway. I have a flashback to London. I imagine us strolling down a few stairs and crossing securely under the crush of hectic wheels overhead. But no. We descend flight after flight to a parking lot. Is this place the bowels of the earth where all the bad cars go?

All I can see are parked cars and directions to hotels, and there is no hotel where I want to go.

We try a couple of these these stairwells with largely the same result, just different hotels.

We find a man next to a car, and Joanna asks him directions. He walks us to staircase P4, which promises us a jardim. There was one, but not the one we wanted. It was a green strip by the water, and was pleasant enough. So we sat on a bench to enjoy the breeze and watch the Wynn sign cycle through its lights for a while. We never did find the way to the island.

We strolled toward the Wynn and got there in time for the first fountain show of the day. This was an occasional burst of flames and waving jets of water done more or less in time with a recording of “Diamonds Are Forever.”

We never got to the jardim on the island. That doesn’t really constitute getting lost, only frustrated. I simply was not traveling hard enough.

We took a little walk up a street with shops on it, as opposed to bank and hotel towers and casinos, which make up the primary landscape in this part of town. Most of the stores seem to sell watches here. I didn’t see any Gaultter, but have seen Patek Philippe, Rolex, Tag Heuer, and a few other familiar names.

It was time for a snack, so we stopped in at a 24-hour eatery for some of the best wonton soup ever. Besides wontons, the broth was full of Chinese capellini. Joanna said the broth was made with dried fish. Even the fried rice was outstanding.

They had bottles of a local brew, Macao Beer, which the label said was a blond ale. It certainly tasted like ale, a good one at that, and was easily the best local brew that I was able to find this trip.

While I was working on that, three men sat down at the other side of the table and ordered two pints of brandy, which came with tiny whiteware stem cups. They spoke Mandarin, Joanna told me.

They said they were drinking the spirits for strength. I guess they were gamblers taking a break from one of the casinos. They asked where I was from and Joanna told them.

Apparently that surprised them. If I was an American, why was I eating rice? And with chopsticks. They told Joanna something to the effect that Americans don’t like rice and I should be eating a sandwich. They were all in good spirits and so this was probably not their first drink for strength of the day. The one who did most of the talking was a little blood-shot.

I tried to tell them that I even eat gwei lo rice, but am not sure they understood me.

Joanna and I took a walk up a boulevard and through another park that looked like an old city wall repurposed. Then we stumbled onto a local open market. There was dragon fruit, which is magenta and green, and other fruits and vegetables, more dried seafood, including dried fish stomach. I remembered stepping into the market near Bangkok last January and Larry telling me, “Welcome back to Asia.”

There was a wet market there, and we explored that: pigs’ heads, fowls’ necks, fish, and bladders. We even remembered to go out by the door we entered so we wouldn’t get lost. We didn’t cross the street, because we weren’t sure you could get there from where we were, so we came back on the same side, and found the hotel without a hitch. We had found the home folk’s Macau or at least part of it, but still hadn’t gotten lost. We simply had to travel harder.

Joanna put on her purple dress and I tied on a tie to go to the casino. She had never been to one. The Crystal Palace on the first floor was semi-boring, mostly baccarat tables. I have seen Sean Connery in his tux playing baccarat, and know that it’s something like Blackjack, but you want to make eight or nine without going over. There was another with dice in a container and mah-jongg tiles, and I had no clue what was going on. People were betting “big” and “small” on the total of the three dice. The table had other places for laying bets, and I still couldn’t figure out what the mah-jongg tiles were for.

We went upstairs to another casino and this was more like it. There were blackjack tables, but casino blackjack zips along so fast, I couldn’t read all the cards. More baccarat. And slot machines. We had some coins and were going to drop a few just so Joanna said that she did. But the machines only take credit cards. This is serious gambling country.

We wandered and wound up at the sister hotel next door, the Grand Lisboa, which looks something like the big ball at Epcot Center that has exploded. They have a high stakes room in one of the casinos there. One table had a minimum bet of a hundred thousand Macanese patacas, about eight grand American. It must get pretty exciting for the players. All of a sudden there was a shout and a fist slammed a table. I took that as an expression of more than mild disappointment.

It’s a round room from which there are several doors leading to additional rooms. In front of each door is a sign that says it is a reserved table.

None of the side games had started and the doors were open. In each room was a baccarat table where a uniformed dealer sat motionless and impassive. Just waiting.

It reminded me of the guy shows up in "Godfather II." He doesn’t have a line; his expression never changes. He just stands behind Al Pacino and he can kill a guy with a coat hanger.

They allow smoking in the casinos and just about nowhere else indoors in Macau. I guess the players need the tranquilizer.

After having enough smoke, we decided to call it a night. We found our hotel, all right, but then couldn’t figure out which wing we needed, or how to get there. We wandered through the halls, including one that contained groups of young women in pushup bras striking up conversations with stray players. Then as we followed the curve of the wall around, there were more ladies with amplified cleavage. It was a parade of hookers.

We had been told the ladies would be downstairs working at night, but I thought that meant outside. It never occurred to me that they would be working inside the hotel under the supervision of the security staff. I guess the hotel considers it another service that it extends to high-rollers.

That was an interesting encounter, and we never would have fallen on it if we hadn’t been lost. But that we still were.

I got an idea. Let’s look for the Crystal Palace; then we can backtrack from there. But we couldn’t find that casino either. After about a half hour of trying to get our bearings, we asked directions. At that time, we were next to the elevator bank we wanted, but were on the ground floor instead of the lobby floor and so we didn’t recognize anything.

It was time to go upstairs and sack out. The island park is right below the window of my room. It lights up at night, like everything else in this neighborhood.