MACAU / HONG KONG

October 1, 2007

We have come to Macau, as it is one of the places in the world Joe has always wanted to visit; largely due to an ancestor who was the Portuguese Prefect in Macau back in the days when Portugal was a world power.

There is next to nothing Portuguese about today’s Macau; gambling is king.  In Macau there has always been casinos, but of the elegant suit and tie variety where wealthy Europeans and Asians gambled away their money at Baccarat tables. Then a number of years ago when everything began to get “bigger and better’ in China, the casinos began to grow and prosper and throw off their  “upper class” veneer and make a bee-line for the newly filled pocketbooks of the Chinese people. Unfortunately, there was no visionary city planning done and the result is quite a mess.  In hindsight they are trying to make fixes, but things such as the traffic patterns are really impossible to address once the buildings are built.  And build they are doing; 24/7 the work goes on at the new and even bigger casinos. If you wake up in the middle of the night and look out your window you can see the torches of the welders firing away. 

 

CONSTRUCTION of NEW CASINOS

The majority of the new casinos, as well as those under construction, are built on reclaimed land.  The reclaimed land pushes the islands closer and closer toward one another, and the dredging of the sea in and around the many islands goes on being done by many huge moored dredging vessels.  They are built just barely above sea level.  Can’t help but wonder about earthquakes and title waves and liquidification and rising levels of the ocean.  Oh well, what do I know.

The construction companies build housing for their workers on site before the work begins; dorm style rooms with stacks of bunk beds and air conditioning.  Workers are also fed on site, no reason to do anything other than eat and sleep and work, and send some of the paycheck home to the family.  Labor is cheap in China, with so many people, there are always many more waiting and willing to do the job.

There are lots and lots of existing casinos, and lots and lots more being built.  When the new Sands Hotel and Casino paid for the building costs of their development in their first year of operation, the rush was on. The tables at all the casinos we visited were filled with people late into the night, mostly young people and mostly Chinese, spending their savings and their hard earned money. The Chinese people are famous gamblers, and Macau is an easy destination.  We did not see high-roller-sorts of people (although I would not have been in the right place in the casino to see them anyway, being very un-casino savvy).  I don’t know if there is anyplace here anymore where James Bond would feel at home.  The casinos today are contrived to keep you gambling and not relaxing.  At the new Wynn Hotel/Casino there is not one couch to sit down on in the lobby area, just keep them on their feet and moving.  There is no feeling of respect for the visitor.  When you combine cutthroat gambling interests with the Chinese Tourist Industry, there could be no other result. Walt Disney where are you when we need you?  Whatever your feeling may be about Uncle Walt, he was brilliant at the logistics of moving people around without making them feel like cattle.

There were few slot machines in the casinos.  Most of the gaming takes place at green felt covered tables with a background of walls covered in advertising in huge moving neon displays.  The Chinese place ads wherever there is an empty space.  The flat screen TV has been a revolution for the Chinese advertising industry.  Now anywhere people are forced to stand, say waiting for an elevator, there is a flat screen TV running ads.  Most annoying are the large flat screen TV’s inside restaurants, usually on every wall.  It is extremely distracting to have a drama or sports event taking place over the shoulder of your dining companion.  Sometimes the sound is turned off, other times the sound is blaring.  I remain amazed that the faces you see in advertisements in China are at best 15 percent Asian faces.

 

CASINO ENTERTAINMENT

WOW.  If I had only known!  But I reckon Kath Kettmann and I are now 40 year too late.  Kath, oh Kath, we could have made it on the stage here, singing rock and roll and dancing.  We were every bit as good, perhaps even better, than the young ladies strutting about and singing on the casino stages in Macau.  They are making more money here than in Las Vegas, and they can’t even put on a decent floorshow?  More likely they are making more money than Vegas because the Chinese people gambling do not yet know to demand more, so the clever casino operators give them the lowest level of service possible. 

As for entertainment, it is surprising that there no big American acts touring China.  Beyonce is about to give a concert in Shanghai’s, but she I the first American star we have even heard of in the past months. Dan Weiner, there is a whole world here in China just waiting for American rock and roll to arrive.

 

LISBOA HOTEL

We spent two nights at the historic Portuguese Lisboa Hotel.  A lovely room, but best of all was the Portuguese Pastry store, which made and sold pastry as good as any pastry I have ever eaten.  They also made a barbecue pork bun that was perfection.  On the lower level of the hotel there was a small room with slot machines that Joe enjoyed as well as a fresh fruit and juice bar where you could get every fresh juice you can imagine.  They just juiced the fruit right there. 

Also on the lower floor were the “ladies of the evening.”  There seems to be an arrangement that they just have to keep walking, and keep walking they do. No loitering allowed. They reminded me of frilly fish in a tropical aquarium, swimming round and round.  It took Joe awhile to catch on to what was going on, and then it became a curiosity to figure out what the deal was.  There gals were sweet and very very young, Joe almost felt he should intercede and talk to these young girls about their chosen life style and offer fatherly advice.  They were so young that he did not have hurt feeling that none of them propositioned him.  They would swing on down the hall, often in groups, holding hands and chatting.  They chatted with the security guys in the halls as they went about marketing themselves, handing out cards with their cell phone numbers to prospective Johns.  These were not smutty girls, but thin sweet girls, girls we could only hope operated more so in the tradition of the Chinese courtesans then the girls in some of the more run down massage parlors.

 

CHINESE HEAT and AIR CONDITIONING

China is hot, and the weather in Macau was oppressive, although we were told we were there in the best of the cool weather.

I had not known that so much of China was just way too hot in the summertime.  Sweat just pours out of Joe’s body and he is often found struggling with the air conditioning unit in our room, another use for the trusty pair of pliers, a must-have for travels in China.  Inevitably the machines have been set inside the rooms with little thought, resulting in the cold air being blown up into a corner of the room nowhere near to where his hot body will be lying when he sleeps. 

The new skyscraper high-rise buildings in China are being built with central air conditioning, but many of the very high apartment buildings are still being built without central air conditioning, with individual units being added by apartment owners.  The units look terrible stuck on to the outside of the buildings, usually in a seemingly geri-rigged fashion, with holes drilled through walls and fat electrical cables connecting the units perched on top of little shelves clinging to the building’s outside wall. The air conditioning units are joined on the building’s exterior by numerous TV dishes.  These add-ons distract from whatever clean or sleek lines were present in the original building structure.

Often the units very soon make a stain that runs down the building wall, and with many air-conditioning units on the wall, the overall effect is one of rust and decay and ruin.  Very bad for property values one might think, but even today new buildings go up without central air conditioning.

Apparently people think they will have more “control” with single cooling units, and that they won’t be paying for other people’s cooling if they all have their own systems.  The air conditioning business in China, for new units and for repairs, is in excellent shape.

And while I am on the subject of the outside appearance of buildings, let me make mention of the ever-present laundry lines. From a sleeping hut on the street to the finest of buildings, people have figured out a way to string up a laundry line.  Apartment buildings are often designed incorporating some sort of balcony to satisfy this national need.  The Chinese people want their clothing and bedding to be air-dried.  People do not have clothes dryers.   There does not seem to be a shortage of electricity, nor does it seem to be expensive  (David Walton says him monthly utility bill runs about ten dollars).  Even in the city where line drying clothing means drying in less-then-pristine air, people choose the clothes line for their dryer.

 

POUSADA de COLOANE

After the Lisboa we moved into the country to a small Portuguese hotel built just above a lovely beach, or what usually is a lovely beach.  We arrived just after a typhoon had passed off the coast and the water was turbid with all the disturbance.  The beach was littered with all the rubbish from the ocean floor.  I was surprised to see thousands of oyster shells along with the ever-popular plastic flip-flop shoe.

The Pousada was lovely and the food was excellent. However, as well as the beach being a mess, the air conditioning did not work and it was too too hot and I had to go into Hong Kong to see about having a letter notarized.  Not enough time to just hang out and relax. 

 

HONG KONG

For me this trip, Hong Kong was a quick trip over and back to Macau by Ferryboat, with the intervening hours spent experiencing U.S. Consulate frustration.  It took three hours to get a letter notarized.  Are all the overseas consulates understaffed?  Beyond the window where one stands to talk with someone “official”, there seem to be many people moving about with no hurry to be of service.  Few of the “windows” are staffed, and the waiting rooms are packed with people waiting their turn.  Once it was your turn however, the service was far better and friendlier than in Chengdu or Beijing.  Well, the service was not that good…I had to go to a nearby hotel to have my notarized letter faxed.

Hong Kong is western sophisticated.  You can feel the difference from the rest of China in an instant.  Very international, very hip.  In my few hours there I saw more well dressed people than I have seen in the past two and a half months.  But then I also saw more tattoos and body piercing than I have seen in the past two and a half months.

The best thing I learned about Hong Kong was that they have built covered elevated sidewalks that are very wide and high in the air and opened at the sides.  Very efficient.  Hong Kong was not designed to deal with today’s traffic flow, but by putting the people up in the air the streets can be wider and there in no worry about pedestrian crossings.  And the pedestrians can wiz along at a rapid pace that would be impossible if they were walking along the streets.  You can walk all over the part of downtown where I was (there are many “downtowns” as Hong Kong is spread out), ramps go off the big hotels, to the various Ferry Docks etc.

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