Where’s Waldo Now?

Nov. 11-13

We found Waldo, as everybody often does, in an unexpected place, this time on the sideline of the route for the 65th Macau Grand Prix.

More on that later.

We made it to the 11:30 service at St.Andrew’s on Sunday morning. It’s on Nathan Road, not far down the hill from Austin Road.

It wasn’t quite what I expected. The church describes itself as an evangelical Anglican church.

The English-language service was in the parish auditorium. The actual church up the hill was holding a Chinese service at the same time.

The hymns consisted of that “God-you’re-so-awesome” pop music that you hear on the radio. Ouch.

The sermon was very Protestant. It was the focus of the service, and long. 

The priest preached on the text from Ecclesiastes about vanities, but from a newer translation that called everything “meaningless.”

According to the preacher at St. Andrew’s, the message is discouraging.  

I remembered reading the same passage when I was in my early teens: “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

Hell, I thought, how liberating. You’re allowed to fuck up now and then because nothing matters all that much.

The service ended with an abbreviated Eucharist, which was characterized in Low-Church terms as “The Lord’s Supper.” That much was comfortingly familiar.

We had some dim sum at a restaurant called Relax a While, or something like that, on Kimberley Road. One of the dishes we had was a barbecued pork called char shu, generally not one of my favorites.

But this one was probably the tastiest I have ever tried.

We crossed Nathan Road to climb the stairs into Kowloon Park. The steps are lined with figures that look like characters from a LEGO video game. 

I’m not sure what they are, although each seems to have a name. None was familiar to me.

It’s the same part of the park that has the avenue of comic book heroes. They are mostly superheroes, and are all from Hong Kong pop culture. 

One that I remembered from last time is Lo Fu Ji, the wise old man. He has a new statue that shows him pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

We heard drums and came around a corner to see a group of women in a coordinated dance. A man had a bass drum and each dancer carried a small drum and two sticks.

They struck the drumheads, stepped, and turned. At times they kept the rhythm with the sticks alone clicking them together. 

We walked in the park for a while, even sat to watch a kung fu ceremony. But that got old quick because most of the time participants were milling about waiting to get organized perhaps. One routine involving fans, though, was almost Kurosawa-like. 

We went back to the hotel for a nap, maybe around three or so. 

That’s when things got really weird.

When I woke up, I assumed it was the next morning. It felt like next morning.

Nothing so convenient, however. It was about 11:30 Sunday night.

So what could we do? We went to a bar.

The second-floor button on the hotel elevator stops the car at a street that has little except bars. We went to the first one the Flame Bar, for a while. 

Joanna had a Campari and soda while I took a couple of lagers. We asked the bartender if he was closing soon. He said the bar is open till five.

We didn’t plan to stay that long and so walked around to Kimberley Road for a late supper. It was about two in the morning. Yeung Kee and Kai Kee were open. I don’t think they close at all. 

So we stopped at Kai Kee for a snack. We tried egg with bitter melon. I’ve had it before, in New York, at a Szechuan restaurant. This version was Cantonese, and so without chiles. Even so, it was pretty good.

We wound up getting back to sleep around four and slept till nine.

Joanna phoned her friend Mei to tell her we were in town and would like to get together with her and her husband, Ron. They called back 20 minutes later and told us to meet them at the Golden Palace restaurant.

In that short time, they had even gotten in touch with a couple of other friends who would join us. 

The Golden Palace is on the 26th floor of a building near the foot of Nathan Road. It is surrounded by picture windows overlooking Victoria Harbor.

We enjoyed an array of dim sum specialties, tripe, buns with Chinese sausage, boneless pigs’ feet, pork dumplings, shrimp dumplings, Singapore mai fun, and a few others besides.

Ron wanted to show us the new bridge to Macau, so we boarded a bus on Nathan Road that took us to the airport on Lantau Island, which is the Hong Kong end of the bridge. 

We were in Macau less than an hour later. The last time Joanna and I made this trip, it was on a hydrofoil.

The ride from Hong Kong starts with a length of the bridge and then dives into a tunnel about 6 kilometers long. Then it emerges onto more bridge in the middle of the Pearl river estuary out of sight of land.

The first land you see later is in Red China. Shortly before it reaches Macau, the bridge has an exit to Zhuhai, on the Mainland.

At the bus terminal, we took a local bus, which brought us to the older of the two Wynn casinos in Macau. The route followed some of the course for the Macau Grand Prix, which is coming up this weekend.

Temporary guard rails have been set up along the road to keep racecars from wiping out large swaths of bystanders.

On the way to the Wynn, we passed the Waldo Casino. We did “Where’s Joanna?” a couple of days ago, and now we found Waldo.

We took the shuttle from the older Wynn casino to the newer one, the Wynn Palace. 

Talk about over the top. The decor included a sculpture of a huge mirrored stiletto shoe with a dragon head, all surrounded by fresh-cut flowers.

Then there was the lighted windmill in red and gold.

We rode on the cablecar that goes over the fountain with the light show. Overhead wheels take the cars around large golden dragons.

The car swings out as it goes around. (I could have lived without that.)

Dinner in Macau was a sort of dim sum, too, but this one was Portuguese: curried potatoes, oxtail, pan-fried sardines, baby beef ribs. 

I had a Bavarian Pilsner with it. The German beers are much lighter than I like and I prefer ale to lager of any kind. But the purity law keeps them several steps above most of the world’s commercial lagers.

We got back to the hotel around 11 and slept till nine.

We went out to pick up breakfast. Along with yogurt and fruit, Joanna had a bo lo baau, a large sweet roll that resembles a small pineapple. I had bo lo yao, the same kind of bun with a slap of butter (the “yao”) stuck inside.

That was going to hold us for a while.

We took off around 1 to go to another of my favorite places in Kowloon, the Walled City Park. We took the No. 26 bus north on Nathan Road.

The bus makes a right a few blocks up and then goes into territory I haven’t explored on my own. You take it to the stop for the Regal Oriental Hotel, which was the hotel for the old airport, which has been replaced by the one on Lantau.

You take one of the side streets, any of which come to Carpenter Road, where the Walled City used to be.

The Walled City was originally a military garrison not far from a waterfront that has since disappeared. Its wall was torn down by the Japanese during the 1930s and the stones were used to expand the old airport. 

We entered the park through the South Gate. I don’t know if it is something that the Japanese left standing or if it is a replacement.

A dense city grew on the site and it seems that no government, Chinese, Hong Kong, or British, exerted authority there. 

Unregulated businesses thrived in the little city and made products from clothes to noodles. There was a street with about a hundred unlicensed dental clinics. Much of the heroin for the region was made there.

In the mid-20th century the Walled City was a haven for refugees from the Reds.

Efforts to control the place met resistance. The Brits tried to close it in the 1950s and rioters in Canton, across the border, burned down the British embassy.

Buildings were enlarged. Some rose to 60 stories. All this without benefit of building codes or inspectors. 

There was little running water. Children used the rooftops as a playground during the day. Junkies used the same roofs as shooting galleries at night.

The slum was demolished in the 1990s, when the park was created in its place. The only original building left standing is the original commandery, which later served as an almshouse for the aged. 

The building now houses a museum and the park offices. There are short films recreating vignettes of life in the Walled City.

It’s a strange feeling to walk through the gorgeous plantings and landscaping and at that same time think about the desperate lives lived here not long ago.

People flocked here in hope of a better life. Many eventually found it. Many did not.

One of my favorite parts of the park is bronze model showing the whole place, the buildings shouldering each other over narrow streets, hole in the middle where the one-story almshouse still stands. 

A mural on a nearby wall is a cross-section of the model. It shows a moment of simultaneous activities in the city—mah jong games, tai chi drills, brothels, restaurants, doctors’ offices, even a small boy peeing over the edge of the roof. 

We met Uncle Man by a garden devoted to the Chinese zodiac. Uncle Man, a volunteer docent, explained the symbolism represented there. 

The rat is the king, who always faces south. the other animals—well, most of them, anyway—face north, in the direction of the king’s face. The rooster, though, has to face east to crow the people awake when the sun rises.

When he learned where we came from, he drew out a bamboo flute and played a couple of American tunes, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and one of my favorites, “You Are My Sunshine.”

I’ve loved that song ever since Kate was an infant. She napped at times at her grandmother’s house. A mobile above the crib played that tune.

We went back to that bar street by the hotel for steak. It was a bit tough, but tasty enough. The only red wine available was called Campero, a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Central Valley of Chile.

It didn’t have that overpowering odd flavor that I associate cabernet. It was much milder, with only a small bite. I liked it well enough, and Joanna did too.

That’s it for now.

Wynn, lose, or draw, my friends, be well above all.

Harry