Macau Redeux

On Saturday we visited Macau again. This time our pace was a bit more leisurely.

I will spare you the details of our journey over. Suffice it to say that we tried to take a recommended "shortcut" and got a bit mixed up. And at one point were were offered a ride to our destination by a "simple" man (think: Cantonese-speaking Sling Blade) whose taxi was a bicycle with a wooden cart attached to it. (An aside -- I totally wanted to take a ride in the thing; D was the one who declined. Anyway).

Macau has a cool landscape. Because it was established by the Pourtugese, a good deal of the architecture is European. There are old churches and things around, and a lot of the street signs are in Pourtegese, which is infinitely easier to understand than Chinese. Macau also looks a lot like Kowloon with its twisty hilly streets. I kept thinking of it as a "snack-sized" Hong Kong all day.

Macau street:


Here is a photo of the ruins of St. Paul's. An info site for Macau tourism says this about the ruins:

Designed by an Italian Jesuit, and, with the assistance of Japanese Christian artisans who had fled from feudal persecution in Nagasaki, the church was built from 1602 to 1637. In 1835, a fire burned it to the ground, leaving only the façade, the staircase and portions of a wall. It remained unchanged until a restoration was undertaken and completed in the summer of 1991.

In the culinary world, Macau is known for its egg tarts. Here is what a Portugeuse egg tart looks like. Notice that the top of the tart is much darker than a regular Chinese egg tart:


This is D after tasting the egg tart (he didn't like it very much, so I got to eat mine and the remains of his):


I also sampled some tasty cookies from this woman, who took little hunks of dough, flattened them in these super hot presses, and then dumped them into a basket underneath. The result tasted like pizelles (those Italian cookies) without the anise.


While Macau is know for its tasty food, it is perhaps best as the gambling capital of China -- it's the only place in China where gambling is legal. Until recently, one Chinese dude had a monopoly on all the betting action. But now, some other investors have broken into the market. For example, there a Sands casino in Macau. And the newest addition is The Venetian. It's not as impressive as the one in Las Vegas, but it does have a Fatburger, which we made a visit to:

We did do more than just eat all day, but you wouldn't know it from the photos that I took.