Days 151 to 155 - Thursday April 2 to Monday April 6 - Macau

On Thursday, Pierre learns that the upcoming weekend is a long weekend. With his free Tuesday, this means that we have 4 days to travel. As mentioned before, we haven't travelled much in China yet, but the one thing I have learned is that things can get very busy when the entire country has a vacation at one time. The Chinese New Year is a notoriously difficult time to travel - picture Christmas holidays in Canada (especially Christmas Eve) but with 1.3 billion billion people. Some people want to see family, some people want to travel abroad, but it seems like half of the population is trying to get somewhere else.

This long weekend is slightly different - the holiday is called "Qing Ming Jai" which seems to translate to "Clean Bright Festival" but which all of the foreigners seem to refer to a Tomb Sweeping Day. From what I understand, it marks the arrival of spring, people go outside and enjoy nature, and most importantly, people tend to the family graves. Everyone we talk to suggests that it's not a crazy time to travel, so we decide to get out of Huizhou.

At first we're pretty ambitious. We toss around the idea a ten-hour overnight bus ride to a beautiful village well-known for its scenery and hiking. When Pierre returns from his next class, he's got reservations about that idea. He asked his students what they think of the village, they're not enthusiastic. Not very interesting, they say.

I take this with a grain of salt. "Their idea of interesting might be very different from ours," I say. "Maybe rural China just isn't all that exotic for them."

Pierre sees my point. "I guess they did suggest I go to Hong Kong for the shopping."

Eventually, we toss the hiking idea back into the "maybe later" pile. We settle on a four-hour bus ride to Macau.

Macau isn't somewhere I had planned to visit. The word I hear most often in association with "Macau" is "casino." It seems that Macau plays the role of Las Vegas/Montecarlo for this part of Asia. However, the guidebook also promises Portugese architecture and a small city that sounds very pedestrian friendly. I'm really not sure what to expect.

Arriving somewhere new is inevitably inconvenient. Where's the hotel, where's the bus, where's the money exchange, which way's north... With Macau, I am concerned about the additional detail of having to deal with a border crossing but we arrive at the bus station and discover the border is about 100 metres from the bus station. We cross the street, enter the building, fill out the usual exit/entry cards, get in line and within 20 minutes of arriving on the bus we've made it through customs to Macau.

I don't know exactly what I expected from Macau. I probably thought it would be more like Hong Kong - big, crowded, bright, flashy, flat, widespread, expensive. It's none of these things. Instead it is bite-sized: hilly, paved with cobblestones, easy to walk, easy on the eyes, and not crowded. While walking towards the center of town, another tourist mentions that he's never seen it this quiet. We walk through the main plaza:

...and down a few side streets to find a hospedaria for the night. Most of the cheap places are on the short and charming alley/street Rua da Felicidade whose name translates to something like "Happiness Street" (of the "happy ending" variety).

According to our reading, the street is not quite the prostitute magnet it used to be, but from what we see it's still fairly active. During our search for a place with the right balance between cheap/sanitary, we wander into some establishments that are clearly family run and not overly pro-prostitute; at another we only make it a few steps up one stairway before the crowd of smiling friendly young women sitting in the waiting room convinces us to head back down the stairs and onto another hostel. Next door to the hostel is a small cookie shop crowded with at least 100 tourists.

In the picture above, the street looks terribly deserted. This is because Pierre always patiently waits for things to clear out before he takes a picture. The moment after the picture is taken, a elderly man and his wife stroll past us, a family walks out of the cookie store, a scooter drives past, a few tourists walk out of a hostel.  This prostitution street is remarkably cozy and safe in the day and early evening.

We end up staying at a hospedaria that gives us the most reasonable price (around 50 CN$ a night). We use Mandarin to negotiate and check in, which goes as smoothly as can be expected and when we get to the room we immediately unplug the phone so no one can call and wake us up in the middle of the night to offer us their services. There are 2 cell phone numbers written on the wall next to the bed and and we're woken up once by the sounds of an enthusiastic working girl down the hall. (Pierre the engineer explains to me that a floating ceiling tends to encourage noise drift).

The hostel has the funkiest key we've seen so far: it slides into the top of the door knob.

During the day, Happiness Street is white and red and crawling with people:

We walk a few metres down the street to have some congee (sounds like KON-jee). Pierre's been dying to eat this since we saw it in Hong Kong a few months ago. I try it in spite of my immediate dislike for it - really, I think it looks phlegmy and revolting - but it turns out to be very addictive. The porridge/soup is a thick rice porridge; the meat balls are a ground pork mix. On top of this you can add the Chinese version of a donut. All of those things individually sound and look like a bad idea, and yet together it tastes amazing...

The three days of our visit blur into one another, and I don't even bother to take many notes, I'm so caught up in enjoying the city. The events that break up our days fall into a some simple categories.

We walk up and down the narrow streets:

We look down:

We look up:

(note the sad dog checking us out through the railings - banished to the church's patio?)

We walk through parks:

We try out all of the wacky (yet brilliant) free exercise machines in the parks:

We do a bit of sightseeing and check out the ruins of St. Paul, which is all that remains of the St. Paul Cathedral, the majority of which burnt down in the 1830s:

We walk to churches:

...to old graveyards...

...and to temples: 

...and check out the small altars we see along the street: 

The entire city is covered in cobblestones, and many sidewalks have mosaics worked into them: 

We stumble across an odd theme-mall which includes a mini replica of the Coliseum:

...a volcano behind a Spanish village ...

...and a general mish-mash of history and architecture:

Back in the real city, we enjoy the colours, grafitti and night life:

 

...and, as always, we eat and eat and eat.  We discover that Macau is famous for a certain kind of almond cookie - we see tourists with bags and bags of cookie boxes.  We also discover that if you go into a certain chain of stores (Koi Kei Bakery), not only do they have generous and fresh samples of all of their products available for customers, but that they'll give you a full size, fresh-from-the-oven sample of their signature cookie.  Every time you go in.  Brilliant. 

After learning that, we hit a few stores every night to get several samples (I give Pierre most of mine), and buy several boxes before we head home on Day 155.

Days 137 to 151 - Thurs March 19 to Wed April 1 - Daily dominant things to do

We plan to try our hand at a weekend road-trip on days 145 to 147 (last weekend) but the weather promises rain and thunderstorms and I catch a bit of a bug, so we stay in the city for what I estimate is our 5th or 6th weekend in a row.  Not really a big deal in the short term, since we both like the city and the downtime in our own place, but it does cut into the number of things that we'll see while we're here.  

Huizhou is not very well-situated for short weekend jaunts to charming villages and cities (the south-east is fairly industrial), so we have the choice of either a) spending a large number of hours on the weekend travelling by bus or train with a short time spent at our actual destination or b) visiting locations within a few hours of Huizhou. The debate continues.

Meanwhile, we find things to fill our week-day time.  People aren't quite sure of what to make of the fact that I'm not working at the moment.   The most common response from the Chinese is "That's wonderful - you'll have so much time for shopping."  I find this a funny response, especially since it's almost everyone's first reaction.  At one point, I wonder whether I should find this a little offensive - is it meant as a sexist jibe or is that just really one of the things they imagine doing with unlimited amounts of time?  (It's the latter.)

I don't really enjoy shopping without a purpose, so it's not something I do with my time alone if I can avoid it.  Most of my solo-shopping is for notebooks - I go through one every week or two and China excels in cute covers, so I'm in heaven.  Bad English abounds.  The cover of my latest notebook reads:

I am in my sweet dreams, the sky / to celebrate with you, gentle, /quiet night, People at the bus drunk Flower

One cutesy planning diary that I come across has a space for a to-do list entitled: Daily dominant things to do.

Though "shopping" is rarely on my list of daily dominant things to do, the three of us seem to spend a lot of time trolling for merchandise as a group, usually after the gym or before dinner. We hit the Walmart for homeware, the Park-and-Shop for groceries, and walk up and down the city streets and alleys, past fruit vendors, DVD stores and tea shops.  Most tea shops boast small group of people sampling tea on low stools at low tables.

"They closed down the tea shops during the revolution because people were going there and fomenting rebellion," Dre mentions to us one day.  We enjoy the verb "foment" for a moment.

"If the anarchists ruled," I say, "people would hang out at the tea shops and foment peace."  We spend a few minutes making up imaginary anti-anarchy slogans for order-niks.

• No more freedom - tell us what to do!
• Screw you, we want rules!
• We're scared.

Pierre's list of daily dominant things to do includes guitar and Chinese study, but these are scheduled around his work hours:  

• Monday 8 to 11:30
• Tuesday off
• Wednesday 8:00 to 9:30, 3:00 to 4:30, 7:30 to 9:00
• Thursday 8:00 to 9:30, 3:00 to 4:30
• Friday 10 to 11:30

It's a relatively light schedule, which is exactly what Pierre was hoping for during this part of his year off from work.  He has few complaints about class, and those he does have seem evenly balanced between those directed at students (rarely take notes) and himself (not well-enough prepared for a particular class).  

The demographic of English classes seems to be about 9:1 girls to guys.  Not really surprising, since in my experience that's a pretty typical ratio for language classes.   At least a few girls are "twitterpating*" a little bit over Pierre, which is sweet.

* A reference to Disney's Bambi, and not to Twitter.

I don't meet many of his students in March, but he fills me in here and there, and gifts and thanks you's from his students make their way home.  

Around day 137,  one student interviews Pierre after class hours for a school project, accompanied by a few fellow students and her mother (so sweet :) .  As a thank-you gift for his time, they send a box of berries home with him, which we devour: 

(We're not sure exactly what type of berry this is - possibly something from the blackberry family, though much tinier and more delicate.)

During one class, Pierre mentions something about being interested in some new recipes.  The next week, a student brings Pierre a recipe for a beef & beet soup (borscht?) - we haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but it sounds yummy:

My personal favourite is a gift he receives on Day 150 (April Fool's day) from his afternoon class. They present him with an anime drawing of himself (and emphasize in their note that it's not an April Fool's trick): 

Photo credits: D

Days 134 to 136 - Mon March 16 to Wed March 18 - Chinese is a Holey Cheese, or: Hey, they're doing that verb

Any other time that I've taken a long trip like this, the Internet has been either not quite as accessible or not as well established.  This time round, I'm enjoying how much easier having the internet makes some things, especially searching for information.  

I spend a lot of my free time (Pierre's work hours) working at my desk, picking away at a few projects I had planned for our time in Huizhou.  One of these projects is language study, especially Chinese and French. The more I search the internet, the more I find fabulous multimedia tools for language study.

Recently, I came across France's TV5 Monde which has a section called Apprendre.tv that they've dedicated to teaching French via video clips and quizzes.  My favourite section at the moment is called "Double Je" and consists of a series of interviews with artists and writers who have mastered French as a second language.  The interviews touch on the process of learning a second language and various aspects of being bilingual.  My favourite interview so far is with Shan Sha , a Chinese woman who published her first novel, in French, only seven years after she moved to France and started learning the language.

At one point in her interview she describes a few false starts she had with trying to learn French:

"Je faisais des phrases en français, c'est un peu comme le fromage, le gruyère, il y a des trous, alors dans ces trous, sortaient les mots chinois, que je regardais dans les dictionnaires, que j'installais dans la langue française." *

* this roughly translates to: I made sentences in French, a bit like cheese, like a gruyère that has holes, and in those holes were Chinese words that I looked up in the dictionary, and that I then plugged back into the French language."

I love this image because for us, right now, Chinese is definitely a holey cheese.  We stumble on holes all the time.

To be clear: I have a grip on reality.  I realize that Chinese will largely remain one big gap even by the time we leave.  Even if I were to spend all of my time flailing away at the dictionary,  it wouldn't download into my brain in the short time we're here.  Still, I have a basic standard: I prefer to be able to basic, everyday things somewhat gracefully (read: with as little grunting and pointing as possible.)  If I run into a situation where I'm lacking a word or a phrase, I make an effort to make sure I look it up and learn it so that the next time I need it, it's there.

It seems to be working well, though basic things slip my mind.  At the teacher's canteen, Pierre and I can proudly say the words of most food we want because we order them every day.  But there are still many times when I come across something we've forgotten to learn though I've made a note of it more than once.

"Please give me bok choy, eggplant, one egg, and...uh... that."

Note to self again : look up the word for "duck meat".

The dictionary is great for filling gaps, sometimes imperfectly.  I know that I can't look up the words for "snow" and "flake" and put them together to talk about winter.  Just as easily as I stumble on gaps in conversation, I stumble across useful words while searching for something else in the Chinese-English side of my Oxford Concise.  I share some of my finds from these dictionary-dips with Pierre from time to time.

"Hey neat," I yell to Pierre in the next room. "The word for snowflake is snow flower."

Most of the words I stumble across are gaps that I instinctively know exist.  Things with equivalents in my English-speaking mind, like shoe, forget, love.  What I find even more interesting are the words I come across that fill gaps that I didn't even know existed.  

"Hey," I tell  Pierre on the bus, "I just found out there's a word in chinese for a friendship spanning two or generations." (shi-4 jiao-1; generation + friend) 

There are some newly discovered gaps I haven't found fillers for yet.  For example, I'm curious if there's a name for the split-bottom pants that so many young toddlers wear here instead of diapers.  Instead of wallowing around in their mess, kids are held up and out by a parent (usually over a sewer grate or near a wall) while the child discreetly (or not) does its business.   There must be a name for these pants, but the search continues.

Every language has things that are hard for students to take seriously until they find out that yes, people actually use that grammar point.  A lot.  In my experience, most English students find the present perfect ("I have ___ed") hard to take seriously, and they often don't bother learning it well.  

I used to find Chinese measure words* hard to take seriously, but now I know they're used constantly, and these too are spread throughout the dictionary.  

*(RE Chinese measure words: it's a bit like the way we might say two cups of tea, three sheets of paper, or one box of chocolates.  Chinese has words like this for every noun, most of which English doesn't have an equivalent for.  Like "three ___ of book" and "one ___ of mattress" and so on.)

"There's a word for things that can be carried in pairs on a yoke," I tell Pierre while we wait for a bus.  We admire this idea for a moment, because it's actually quite practical in a culture with a history of farming and carrying things around on yokes.  We eventually end up in a conversation about English's obsession on names for groups of animals.  A herd of elephants.  A litter of puppies.  A murder of crows.  An ostentation of peacocks.  

Some of the random dictionary words I share with Pierre appear to stick with him.  

"Hey," he says on the bus, and points out the window to a young family on the sidewalk.  "They're doing that verb."

Ba. Third tone. To hold a baby while it relieves itself.

Days 130 to 133 - Thurs March 12 to Sun March 15 - Huizhou West Lake

Huizhou isn't getting a lot of sun right now.  Most days, it's cloudy, some days it rains. Our apartment, like most apartments in south China, has no insulation or heating, so when it's 10 or 12 degrees outside the apartment is only slightly warmer inside.  On cold days, we walk around the house with layers of clothes - I shuffle around in long johns, pants, several layers of shirts and wrapped in a blanket; Pierre curls up in his fleece jacket and a toque.  At night it's even colder, so we curl up under several layers of blanket in several layers of clothes.  It's a bit like being on a camping trip with no fixed end date.  We buy an electric kettle and drink many pots of hot water.

After a short (or long) stretch of these cold cloudy days, we appreciate even more those days when the sun comes out.  On Day 132 the sky is blue and air warms up so we throw on a couple of light jackets and head out to check out the West Lake area of Huizhou.  

On the subject of West Lake, our Huizhou map says: "With time passing by, there are some changes having taken place.  West Lake has become a resort for holidays."  This translates into: there's been a lot of work done to make/keep the area beautiful (about 3 sq km) and it's a popular tourist spot.  From what we know of Huizhou it's one of the few "touristy" things to do in town - other than the scenic area at West Lake,  the city mainly caters to eating, working and shopping. Mostly the latter two.

Because of this, West Lake seems to be the place to find large numbers of families with small children, and the sellers have plenty of toys for them.  My small experience with kids in Canada tells me that most Canadian toddlers are pretty koo-koo for balloons.  In Huizhou, toy windmills seem to be the big sellers: 

Windmills = less torment for toddlers than balloons.  They don't float away or explode.  (Plus you're more likely to avoid situations like Billy's Balloon :)

West Lake also seems to be a popular date spot.  It's a beautiful spot (5 lakes, 6 bridges) and it's cheap, only 10 kwai/2 $CAN for a ticket to visit three main sites that are offered: pagoda, bridges and a landscaped hilly area (<- not quite sure what it's called).  We see throngs of couples wandering around taking advantage of the weather.   The majority we run into at this pagoda, (re)built in the 1600s:

It's possible to walk up to the top and get a good view of the area.  There are maybe 10 or so flights of steep wooden stairs leading up to the top.  Each flight of stairs is only wide enough for one person to climb up or down using both hands and feet, so it takes a while to reach the top, especially when it's crowded. The walls are about 6 feet thick with recessed windows below geometric patterns like these:

Other windows have small stairways that lead up to them, and where you can get a view of the city:

Here, someone (top left) is sneaking a peek of us taking a picture: 

Pierre's been here before, so he's on a mission to find a doorway that he took a picture of last time with his old camera, and that he wasn't happy with.  So he takes it again:  

We're not in top tourist form today - since we're enjoying the weather and the chance to get some photos.  I know we'll be back so I don't pay too much attention to the historical details this time round.  We learn that a famous poet, Su Dongpo, lived in Huizhou during the Song Dynasty (around the 1000s). We see a a statue dedicated to him and wander through a museum with calligraphied copies of his poems.  Other than that, we just enjoy looking around.  We see what looks like a grave:

...check out some stone detailing...

...and a great old tree outside a temple:

We stop for a quick dinner of duck and veggies, and then head off to catch city bus #7 back to the university before sundown:

photo credits: P, P, P, D, D, P, P, P, P, P