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.
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.
