Hong Kong in October, part 5

Ashes and Ruins and the YMCA Project

October 20

Coffee is easier to come by in Macau than in Hong Kong. They serve small cups of a strong brew at the Noite e Dia Cafe in the hotel. The Chinese name is a little different and translates as “No Night Sky.” I guess the place is open 24 hours, like the casinos. But there’s no smoking in the cafe.

There are signs everywhere reminding those in nicotine withdrawal that the fine for smoking in a public place in Macau is 600 Macanese patacas, usually written MOP$600. (Don’t know what the “O” stands for.) That comes to $48 U.S.

I saw one of the signs at free-drink bar in the Crystal Palace Casino—apparently the only place in the casino where you can’t light up. I guess they limit you to one tranquilizer at a time here.

The first objective of the day was to hit a local icon, an image on T-shirts and postcards all over Macau. It is the facade, which is all that remains, of a Jesuit church founded in the late 16th century. It is known as the Ruin of Sao Paolo.

The rest of St. Paul’s burned to the ground during a typhoon or earthquake.

On the way we took a long cut through an alley and made the first find of the day. It was in an even smaller alley off to the side, an old temple dedicated to Guan Dai, the god of protection.

                        Joanna outside the Guan Dai Temple.

Besides the fierce-looking effigy on the altar, there were pikes, like the ones you see in Jet Li costume dramas. They were in a rack by the wall. They were probably costume pikes because they had no edge.

Another interesting feature consisted of dozens of coils hanging at different heights from the ceiling. I thought they were ceremonial lanterns at first. Then the ash dropped off one of them, and I realized they were oversize incense offerings.

We bought incense sticks to put in the votive pots. The atmosphere inside the temple was not unlike a casino, although the smoke smelled different. We had lit our incense sticks and were standing them in the sand in various iron pots, and getting rained on by falling ash from the coils overhead. The entire place was dusted in ash, which gave the red paint (everything in a temple is red or gold) a white patina.

Handling incense leaves a saffron-color dust on your fingers. The temples, I learned, have little spigots where you can wash your hands. When we got outside, I dusted off my pocket square. I was still wearing the linen suit, which is about the color of incense ash and so looked clean.

Macau is very colorful. Many of the sidewalks are decorated with mosaics. Unlike the geometric mosaics in Prague, these are generally images of marine life and ships.

We came across a tiled fountain, as well, that seemed to depict an early stage of Macau’s development, complete with a Chinese official and tonsured monks.

Somewhere along the way we stopped in an open-air market where Joanna ordered some cane juice. Made fresh:

Macau is very small. Everything on the map looks farther away than it is in real life. We had walked less than a mile from the hotel and came to a square with a fingerpost pointing the direction to the ruins. A hundred or so steps later we were in Old Macau climbing a crowded pedestrian street lined with pastry and souvenir shops.

 We bought a couple of egg custard tarts during the climb. This confection is a staple of the sweets business in Hong Kong and the ones in Macau may have a Portuguese accent: very flaky crust, buttery custard filling.

In a matter of minutes we could see the steps leading to the facade of St. Paul’s. Fortified by egg custard, we were ready for it.

You can see from today’s photo, Harry Meets the Tourists, how ready I was for those steps.

 The ruin has become a symbol of Macau, but several years ago there was talk of demolishing it because it was leaning so badly that it constituted a public hazard. Conservationists stepped in and the authorities decided to excavate instead. The structure is backed by a steel support.

At the top of the steps we found a colorful display advertising the approaching Moon Festival. One of the features of the holiday is a moon cake. There were oversize replicas of moon cakes and an effigy of the moon goddess. This may not be what the Jesuit Fathers had in mind.

 During the excavations, a number of artifacts surfaced, and many of them are housed in a small museum in the crypt. There is also a stone chapel there, part of which includes rubble fallen from the old church. They were playing a recording of Gregorian chant when we went through it.

When we were in the museum, an incident occurred that reminded me why I had to give up robbing banks.

This was Saturday. Two days earlier, I had been shopping for a tailor in Kowloon. One of the shops was Maxwell’s. They told me the “might” be able to have a suit ready for me in a week, but couldn’t guarantee it. Maxwell’s budgets a minimum of two weeks to produce a suit. Fair enough, but it wouldn’t work with my schedule, so I left.

A man came up to me in the half-lit museum and said, “I saw you in Maxwell’s the other day.” I was in Maxwell’s for less than five minutes. This guy works there and recognized me three days later all the way off in Macau.

I’m too easy to identify. What are my chances of sliding through a line-up?

He works for Maxwell’s, lives in Kowloon and Switzerland, and does tours through Western Canada for the company. You see ads in the paper sometimes for this sort of thing. They set up in a hotel for a week or so and you can be fitted for a suit that will be made in Hong Kong and delivered to you. He was in Macau guiding a friend who was visiting from Europe.

He took my e-mail address and said he’d let me know when there is a special on shirts. That encounter was uncanny. Weeks later I don’t know if it was mostly funny or mostly scary.

Overlooking the site of St. Paul’s is a fort. According to a sign outside, the Jesuits built that too, sometime in the early 17th century. It helped keep the Dutch out of Macao at one point, and the sign says it was in military service until sometime in the first half of the 20th century. I imagine that by then they didn’t expect to fire any of the old muzzle-loading cannons.

We went up a couple of side streets and saw a tour group heading into a museum. It was the Lou Kai Mansion, the great house of a Macau merchant dynasty. Or in any event, it looked like it.

We went up a couple of side streets and saw a tour group heading into a museum. It was the Lou Kai Mansion, the great house of a Macau merchant dynasty. Or in any event, it looked like it.

Now it was Joanna’s turn to have flashbacks. She started to explain details of the house because this one was bigger but in all other ways identical to her grandfather’s house in Canton where she spent a few years as a very young girl before the Reds came. That was exciting.

The rooms are lighted by open skylights. The area under the skylight is recessed to contain the rain, and there’s a drain in one corner of the recess. Each room has one, and this is also the place where you do the laundry or kill the chickens.

Next stop was Lin Kai Miu, which we had read about in one of the local travel brochures. It has several altars dedicated to various gods (or Buddhist saints, depending on your persuasion). The name means “Scream of Mourning Temple,” so I had to go there.

We waited for a few minutes at a taxi stand and when we got a cab, I gave the driver the name of the temple and the Portuguese names of the streets—Estrada do Repouso and Travessa da Corda. He knew as much as I did about how to get there.

I had flashbacks to that driver who was using a GPS to take us to Newark airport for our trip to London.

The driver had a long animated discussion with the dispatchers, who just wanted to get rid of him and us. So he hit the gas and we sped through narrow streets threatening pedestrians and property. Somehow he got us there. Maybe even he didn’t know how he had done it.

Lin Kai is also dusty with the ashes of burning incense.

We bought two large bundles of incense (“heung” in Cantonese) and placed sticks in front of as many saints as we could until our supply ran out. I hope one of those saints offers protection from uninformed cab drivers.


We strolled back past the ruins and down to the plaza that was our landmark for the day. It is called the Largo do Senado and is across the street from a large white colonial-looking municipal building.

 Dinner was at Restaurante Platao on Travessa da Sao Domingos, which we had found when we were wandering up and down the little alleys below the ruins.

We looked at the menu and decided to try it. Joanna went to get the business card. I waited on the street, clearly just the person to attract a crowd of kids from the local YMCA. Their accents were thick and I wasn’t sure what they wanted donation for. I told them that there is a lady who is coming to help me understand.

After Joanna joined us, it took about a minute and a half to realize that they in fact were not fund-raisers at all. They were working on a project to teach people to say phrases in foreign languages. They were going to teach me Korean.

“I don’t know. I’m still struggling to learn some Cantonese.”

That was the magic word. A new card came out, and I went through “How are you?” (Ney ho ma? Literally, “You well, huh?”) “Good afternoon.” “Thank you.” (M’goy) “I love Macau.” (Ngao oy Ahm Muen) and “I am handsome.” As you can see, you lose some if you don’t use it every day.

I balked at the last one for dread of the Evil Eye. But they convinced me to give it a try.

The YMCA crowd was gone by the time Joanna and I got back to the Platao later for dinner.

I had stewed oxtail in red wine and Joanna had a sea bass grilled and served with the head on. We bought a bottle of a Portuguese red wine to go with it. The wine was a little sharp, but it went well with the food. Joanna had maybe a glass and a half. I had the rest.

We walked back to the hotel where I sat in the dark for a bit, drinking a few cans of beer and watching the lights until my eyelids grew heavy.

Oct. 20

Now, that's what I call traveling.  Glad you two are having fun.

Hey, four men were seen removing a piano from your house today, Harry. In broad daylight. Nobody alerted the authorities or anything, and then it showed up in our dining room. And then Emily and Wiley had a big fight over who would go first.

I know, weird stuff!

Karl