7.29.15
It may technically be the 28th again, since I'm writing this on the plane as I fly east toward San Francisco. It doesn't matter, of course; all that matters right now is that I'm slowly making my way home. After another seven or so hours in the air, and a fifteen-hour layover in San Francisco, I'll be Houston bound. I'm getting home not quite a week early so I can attend the memorial reception and burial of my father-in-law, who passed away several days earlier. I've chosen not to discuss it until now, because it was not always clear when exactly I'd be coming home.
On my final night in Macau I make reservations at the Clube Militar, the nearly 150-year-old institution founded as an educational and social organization for Portuguese soldiers. In later years it opened its membership to civilians and developed a more social than educational bent, and in 1995 it began letting non-members dine on the premises. It has a solid reputation in terms of its food and atmosphere, to which I can now personally attest. The service is a little slow, but I'm in no hurry. I wear a jacket and tie since there's a dress code, but judging by the attire of those around me it's considerably looser than I'd expected.
Earlier in the day I make one last trip to the Livraria Portuguesa and carefully go through the shelves again. Naturally, it doesn't take much effort to find a few more books, though the next day, when my bags are packed, I worry about exceeding the airline's weight limit (as it happens, I don't even come close) and for a brief moment almost regret my bibliophilia, so fucking heavy and awkward is my luggage. The real problem is my choice of bags, a problem I'll try to resolve before I go on another trip likely to result in numerous book purchases.
I've alerted the Portuguese Department of my early departure, and Ricardo and company have been nothing but helpful. I'd like to stay the full term, of course, but getting back to Texas is my priority. And so, when the time comes, I clean up my dorm room, make sure I have all my things, and hand my keycard to the guard in the lobby. I use the last 2.5 patacas on my Macau Pass to get to the Praça de Ferreira do Amaral, and from there to the Terminal Marítimo, where I buy a Turbojet ticket to Hong Kong. It's all very matter-of-fact and unemotional; there are no goodbyes said, alas, since I leave while others are in class, though I do leave a note for Eason, thanking him for showing me a part of town I'd not yet seen and telling him to stay in touch. Macau, always ready to welcome newcomers and their money, is as indifferent to my departure as the immigration agent who glances at my passport and lazily flips it back at me. I don't take any of it personally. After all, I just spent sixteen days experiencing Macau in my own way, and it'll take more than a bureaucrat's sour attitude to keep me from coming back.
As the ferry leaves the terminal I see a new island being reclaimed from the sea just to the east of the city. Within a year or two that island will house the immigration and customs complex responsible for traffic coming into Macau across the massive Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, currently under construction. When I came here from Hong Kong I saw significant spans of it lurking in the haze off to starboard, already finished; looking at it again, this time off to port, even more of it stands ready to bear the weight of countless cars, and it seems as if it'll only need another fortnight before it's complete. Who knows what will happen then?
Not me, but when I get back from my next trip to Macau, I'll be sure to once again tell you everything I've learned.
Thanks for reading, folks. Muito obrigado.
D.A.S.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Monday, July 27, 2015
Curso de Verão: Update #6
7.26.15
I realized yesterday, in yet another case of "D.A. doesn't pay attention", that all my references to "Ferreira Amaral" should really be to "Ferreira do Amaral", since that's the man's proper surname, and what's used on street signs. This oversight, while embarrassing, is made a little less so- but more confusing!- by the fact that all the Macau bus maps, and the signs on the buses themselves, refer to "Praça Ferreira Amaral". Oh well.
Saturday is spent visiting the historic center of Macau, which is another way of saying I spend it dodging the hordes of visitors touring the ruins of São Paulo, the Largo do Senado, and everything in between, which is mainly old buildings tenanted by places selling rather mundane consumer goods, the ubiquitous baked treats (almond cookies and pastéis de nata; I take the opportunity to finally eat one of the latter) and, for as of yet undiscerned reasons, jerky. Rather than mill around for an hour in the sun, I go to Cafe Ou Mun for an espresso, joined by my classmate Ambera. We chat, and I find just enough change in my pocket to pay for my coffee, since they won't take my $HK500 note- it's too early in the day and they don't have change.
Returning to the façade of Macau's most famous landmark, the 200 or so students from the Universidade make a rather rushed visit to the Museu de Macau, where I buy a Macanese cookbook. I've been to the museum before, and while there's a temporary exhibit about trade between France and China during the 18th century worth examining, I get the feeling we shouldn't linger, as there are more places to visit and lunch to be eaten at the Hotel Metropole. Turns out there's only one more stop, the Casa de Lou Kau or 盧家大屋, the significance of which (aside from some good examples of Chinese architecture) is lost on me, seeing as how it's packed and I don't get the chance to read many of the placards. From there, it's off to the hotel, where the Curso de Verão takes up an entire banquet hall and is fed several courses of Chinese food that doesn't quite rank as good, but certainly beats canteen food.
And thus ends our day with the Instituto Cultural, which feels more like a free-for-all than a guided tour, but so it goes. I'm mainly here because I've arranged to find Camilo Pessanha's grave with the help of Jorge Cavalheiro, the sagaciously-bearded gentleman ("Cavalheiro" is Portuguese for "gentleman"- get it?) who's been in Macau for decades. We meet at Caravela and set off toward the perpetually-being-restored Bairro de São Lázaro, situated next to the cemetery. "I've visited this grave many times and always have to look for it," Professor Cavalheiro says as we walk through the densely packed graveyard, which he says does not actually require one to be Catholic in order to acquire permanent residency. We find the grave fairly quickly, I take some photos, and, after making sure I can get back on my own, Professor Cavalheiro bids me farewell: a friend of his lives nearby and he's going to take advantage of the proximity. I'd hoped for more time to converse with him, but I'm happy with what I get, as he answers all my questions about Macau and himself straightforwardly and doesn't hesitate to repeatedly correct my Portuguese.
Professor Cavalheiro says he'll be going back to Portugal for good sometime in the next couple of years, and based on our discussions of Macau's astronomical real estate prices ("renting is expensive, and buying is impossible") and the general surge in the cost of living, I can understand why. There's more to it than that, I'm sure- based on what little I know, the city has become all but unrecognizable over the past couple decades, and no matter how much one loves a place seeing it transform that much is never easy, even if it's for the better. In Macau's case, it could be argued that rapid development has not been quite the blessing some might think, but I'm not in the mood to get into that right now, nor does my opinion count for much in the first place. I'm just pleased to have spent some time with someone who knows so much about this remarkable city.
7.27.15
Man, I didn't even finish talking about Saturday in my last entry, though there isn't much more to add. I visit the Jardim de Lou Lim Ioc/盧廉若公園, a classic Suzhou-style garden, which I'm a total sucker for. There's an art exhibit, complete with the artists involved, going on in what I think is usually the Casa Cultural de Chá, or Cultural Teahouse. I see some neat paintings and some good calligraphy and try a couple thimble-sized cups of tea, one of which I think is an oolong and quite delicious, the other a pu-erh type that's a bit too earthy for me.
Having spent most of the day on my feet on Saturday, Sunday rolls around and I tell myself I'm not gonna do shit. Except, of course, I'm totally gonna do shit, because I'm leaving Macau in a couple days and there's no rest for the wicked. I decide to visit Coloane, which once upon a time was the southernmost island of the territory and its least developed area until- you guessed it- the gambling laws were loosened and foreign gambling interests, mainly American, arrived, which resulted in much of the sea between Taipa and Coloane being reclaimed and covered in casinos and hotels. Taipa's now a horrible mess of perpetual construction; the Cotai strip, as the new patch of land was so christened by professional greedhead/shitheel Sheldon Adelson, lacks any of the little charm and none of the nominal walkability possessed by its Las Vegas counterpart; and Coloane, while currently not under assault by developers, remains a tempting target, since the Macau government continues to straddle the fence with regard to building casinos there.
Fortunately, Coloane remains home to Macau's biggest park, a vast, hilly, tropical sprawl which covers much of the island. The village of Coloane is quiet and fairly picturesque in a run-down, rural way. The Chapel of São Francisco Xavier is supposed to contain one of the saint's arm bones, though I don't spot it during my visit. (There is an exceptionally creepy, dead-eyed baby Jesus, though, and copies of O Clarim, the trilingual Catholic weekly newspaper, are available for 12 patacas a pop; I buy one because I want a copy of each of Macau's Portuguese papers, and it's interesting seeing the presence of an English section- a wise move given that the Filipino Catholic community here probably outnumbers the native Catholics.) I get the feeling half the buildings here aren't inhabited, and I hope I'm wrong, because if I'm not it means the real estate speculation Professor Cavalheiro mentioned has extended even to this easygoing corner of the RAEM. Strolling along the waterfront is pleasant as long as you don't look at the sea: at low tide the sand is studded with broken concrete and trash, and there are people out there jet-skiing and kayaking on water that makes Galveston's look downright inviting. Have fun, dudes.
From the vila de Coloane it's back on the bus, past some Chinese nuns, the prison, and some nice tropical landscapes, to the Praia de Hac Sá, or 黑沙海灘, Macau's major beach. 黑沙 means "black sand", though these days it's mostly grey, and even then only in places- I've read that they filled it in with regular ol' yellowish sand due to erosion. That said, it's a pretty nice place to spend time: I take off my shoes and stroll back down the beach after following the inland course along campgrounds and barbeque pits, the latter already claimed by Filipino families, groups of Muslim women in hijab, and shirtless, tattooed Chinese dudes. When you read, over and over, just how special Macau is for being a tolerant crossroads between east and west, it's easy to roll your eyes and think of such claims as being overwrought attempts at selling the city to the world. But here I am, some barefoot American longhair, watching all kinds of people enjoy a leisurely Sunday of sun worship and grilling outdoors- and, far as I can tell, this sort of behavior is the norm here.
I ran into Professor Cavalheiro on the bus from campus, and he recommended a place called Miramar for lunch. I have no luck finding it, so I hit up my first choice, the world-renowned Fernando's, where a sign out front announces "Não temos ar condicionado, ketchup ou cadeiras para bébés, mas temos comida e bebidas!" (We don't have air conditioning, ketchup, or booster seats, but we have food and drinks!). It's a good thing I'm not very hungry, because the place is packed and the wait, based on the number of people milling about and killing time at the bar, is long enough for me to not even bother asking for a table. Instead, I find a stool at the bar next to a couple Europeans whose language I can't decipher- one minute I think I hear Portuguese, but they speak to the bartender in English; the next minute I hear Dutch syllables, and the next, French, so who knows- and drink a couple bottles of Super Bock in styrofoam coozies. The predominance of Super Bock rather than Sagres in Macau remains a source of curiosity for me. I prefer Sagres, which some places have, but I'd like to know why the other is so popular. I can only assume there's some specific distribution deal in place, or some division along regional, or more arcane, lines among the Portuguese community here that puts Super Bock on top. Anyhoo, Fernando's is a nice place to relax for a bit before catching the bus back to campus, and the beers are reasonably priced.
Sunday night I go to Henri's Galley, purported origin of one of my favorite dishes ever, galinha à africana. Henri's, situated on Avenida da Republica two doors down from a Lotus dealership and commanding a good view of Nam Van and the Macau Tower, has been around since the '70s, and to my surprise doesn't feel like it. The furniture's been updated, as has the lighting, and while there's still a heavily Portuguese nautical theme going on, it's not too kitschy. The overall atmosphere is really nice, I gotta say. The staff is attentive and friendly, and the food- I get torradinhas de camarão, or shrimp toast, and galinha à africana- is great. The recipe for galinha à africana is printed on the placemats and is nearly identical to the one I've followed since I started cooking the dish at home, but there's no mistaking the difference between mine and Henri's. The restaurant's version achieves an amazing balance of coconut and peanut flavors, with the finely-minced shallot and garlic providing a perfect texture and the paprika giving everything a smoky background and lovely red hue.
Suffice to say that I leave contented, and set off up Barra hill to walk off the meal and see the Palacete de Santa Sancha and the surrounding neighborhood, which includes the former Hotel Bela Vista, now the residence of the Consul-Geral de Portugal em Macau e Hong Kong. I walk by a woman offering treats to a stray cat in a tree, which makes me smile. (The cat was on his way down by the time I passed.) There's hardly anyone around save cops on guard duty outside of Santa Sancha and a couple other buildings, and everything is quiet. In short, it's readily apparent that I'm in a wealthy neighborhood, but not once do I feel like I'm being eyeballed or hustled along, nor do I get the impression that the locals with whom I share the street are, either.
When I get back to campus I expect to hear from Calvin and his pals about getting together to drink wine, which we discussed earlier in the day, but no dice. I figure I missed my chance, and then, around 11:30, there's knocking at my door, and I hear Calvin and his friends talking in Cantonese. I'm already in bed, so I ignore them. I'm too old to start drinking at midnight, man, good as it sounds, which honestly ain't that good.
Later, folks. Expect one more update before I get home, probably from Hong Kong.
I realized yesterday, in yet another case of "D.A. doesn't pay attention", that all my references to "Ferreira Amaral" should really be to "Ferreira do Amaral", since that's the man's proper surname, and what's used on street signs. This oversight, while embarrassing, is made a little less so- but more confusing!- by the fact that all the Macau bus maps, and the signs on the buses themselves, refer to "Praça Ferreira Amaral". Oh well.
Saturday is spent visiting the historic center of Macau, which is another way of saying I spend it dodging the hordes of visitors touring the ruins of São Paulo, the Largo do Senado, and everything in between, which is mainly old buildings tenanted by places selling rather mundane consumer goods, the ubiquitous baked treats (almond cookies and pastéis de nata; I take the opportunity to finally eat one of the latter) and, for as of yet undiscerned reasons, jerky. Rather than mill around for an hour in the sun, I go to Cafe Ou Mun for an espresso, joined by my classmate Ambera. We chat, and I find just enough change in my pocket to pay for my coffee, since they won't take my $HK500 note- it's too early in the day and they don't have change.
Returning to the façade of Macau's most famous landmark, the 200 or so students from the Universidade make a rather rushed visit to the Museu de Macau, where I buy a Macanese cookbook. I've been to the museum before, and while there's a temporary exhibit about trade between France and China during the 18th century worth examining, I get the feeling we shouldn't linger, as there are more places to visit and lunch to be eaten at the Hotel Metropole. Turns out there's only one more stop, the Casa de Lou Kau or 盧家大屋, the significance of which (aside from some good examples of Chinese architecture) is lost on me, seeing as how it's packed and I don't get the chance to read many of the placards. From there, it's off to the hotel, where the Curso de Verão takes up an entire banquet hall and is fed several courses of Chinese food that doesn't quite rank as good, but certainly beats canteen food.
And thus ends our day with the Instituto Cultural, which feels more like a free-for-all than a guided tour, but so it goes. I'm mainly here because I've arranged to find Camilo Pessanha's grave with the help of Jorge Cavalheiro, the sagaciously-bearded gentleman ("Cavalheiro" is Portuguese for "gentleman"- get it?) who's been in Macau for decades. We meet at Caravela and set off toward the perpetually-being-restored Bairro de São Lázaro, situated next to the cemetery. "I've visited this grave many times and always have to look for it," Professor Cavalheiro says as we walk through the densely packed graveyard, which he says does not actually require one to be Catholic in order to acquire permanent residency. We find the grave fairly quickly, I take some photos, and, after making sure I can get back on my own, Professor Cavalheiro bids me farewell: a friend of his lives nearby and he's going to take advantage of the proximity. I'd hoped for more time to converse with him, but I'm happy with what I get, as he answers all my questions about Macau and himself straightforwardly and doesn't hesitate to repeatedly correct my Portuguese.
Professor Cavalheiro says he'll be going back to Portugal for good sometime in the next couple of years, and based on our discussions of Macau's astronomical real estate prices ("renting is expensive, and buying is impossible") and the general surge in the cost of living, I can understand why. There's more to it than that, I'm sure- based on what little I know, the city has become all but unrecognizable over the past couple decades, and no matter how much one loves a place seeing it transform that much is never easy, even if it's for the better. In Macau's case, it could be argued that rapid development has not been quite the blessing some might think, but I'm not in the mood to get into that right now, nor does my opinion count for much in the first place. I'm just pleased to have spent some time with someone who knows so much about this remarkable city.
7.27.15
Man, I didn't even finish talking about Saturday in my last entry, though there isn't much more to add. I visit the Jardim de Lou Lim Ioc/盧廉若公園, a classic Suzhou-style garden, which I'm a total sucker for. There's an art exhibit, complete with the artists involved, going on in what I think is usually the Casa Cultural de Chá, or Cultural Teahouse. I see some neat paintings and some good calligraphy and try a couple thimble-sized cups of tea, one of which I think is an oolong and quite delicious, the other a pu-erh type that's a bit too earthy for me.
Having spent most of the day on my feet on Saturday, Sunday rolls around and I tell myself I'm not gonna do shit. Except, of course, I'm totally gonna do shit, because I'm leaving Macau in a couple days and there's no rest for the wicked. I decide to visit Coloane, which once upon a time was the southernmost island of the territory and its least developed area until- you guessed it- the gambling laws were loosened and foreign gambling interests, mainly American, arrived, which resulted in much of the sea between Taipa and Coloane being reclaimed and covered in casinos and hotels. Taipa's now a horrible mess of perpetual construction; the Cotai strip, as the new patch of land was so christened by professional greedhead/shitheel Sheldon Adelson, lacks any of the little charm and none of the nominal walkability possessed by its Las Vegas counterpart; and Coloane, while currently not under assault by developers, remains a tempting target, since the Macau government continues to straddle the fence with regard to building casinos there.
Fortunately, Coloane remains home to Macau's biggest park, a vast, hilly, tropical sprawl which covers much of the island. The village of Coloane is quiet and fairly picturesque in a run-down, rural way. The Chapel of São Francisco Xavier is supposed to contain one of the saint's arm bones, though I don't spot it during my visit. (There is an exceptionally creepy, dead-eyed baby Jesus, though, and copies of O Clarim, the trilingual Catholic weekly newspaper, are available for 12 patacas a pop; I buy one because I want a copy of each of Macau's Portuguese papers, and it's interesting seeing the presence of an English section- a wise move given that the Filipino Catholic community here probably outnumbers the native Catholics.) I get the feeling half the buildings here aren't inhabited, and I hope I'm wrong, because if I'm not it means the real estate speculation Professor Cavalheiro mentioned has extended even to this easygoing corner of the RAEM. Strolling along the waterfront is pleasant as long as you don't look at the sea: at low tide the sand is studded with broken concrete and trash, and there are people out there jet-skiing and kayaking on water that makes Galveston's look downright inviting. Have fun, dudes.
From the vila de Coloane it's back on the bus, past some Chinese nuns, the prison, and some nice tropical landscapes, to the Praia de Hac Sá, or 黑沙海灘, Macau's major beach. 黑沙 means "black sand", though these days it's mostly grey, and even then only in places- I've read that they filled it in with regular ol' yellowish sand due to erosion. That said, it's a pretty nice place to spend time: I take off my shoes and stroll back down the beach after following the inland course along campgrounds and barbeque pits, the latter already claimed by Filipino families, groups of Muslim women in hijab, and shirtless, tattooed Chinese dudes. When you read, over and over, just how special Macau is for being a tolerant crossroads between east and west, it's easy to roll your eyes and think of such claims as being overwrought attempts at selling the city to the world. But here I am, some barefoot American longhair, watching all kinds of people enjoy a leisurely Sunday of sun worship and grilling outdoors- and, far as I can tell, this sort of behavior is the norm here.
I ran into Professor Cavalheiro on the bus from campus, and he recommended a place called Miramar for lunch. I have no luck finding it, so I hit up my first choice, the world-renowned Fernando's, where a sign out front announces "Não temos ar condicionado, ketchup ou cadeiras para bébés, mas temos comida e bebidas!" (We don't have air conditioning, ketchup, or booster seats, but we have food and drinks!). It's a good thing I'm not very hungry, because the place is packed and the wait, based on the number of people milling about and killing time at the bar, is long enough for me to not even bother asking for a table. Instead, I find a stool at the bar next to a couple Europeans whose language I can't decipher- one minute I think I hear Portuguese, but they speak to the bartender in English; the next minute I hear Dutch syllables, and the next, French, so who knows- and drink a couple bottles of Super Bock in styrofoam coozies. The predominance of Super Bock rather than Sagres in Macau remains a source of curiosity for me. I prefer Sagres, which some places have, but I'd like to know why the other is so popular. I can only assume there's some specific distribution deal in place, or some division along regional, or more arcane, lines among the Portuguese community here that puts Super Bock on top. Anyhoo, Fernando's is a nice place to relax for a bit before catching the bus back to campus, and the beers are reasonably priced.
Sunday night I go to Henri's Galley, purported origin of one of my favorite dishes ever, galinha à africana. Henri's, situated on Avenida da Republica two doors down from a Lotus dealership and commanding a good view of Nam Van and the Macau Tower, has been around since the '70s, and to my surprise doesn't feel like it. The furniture's been updated, as has the lighting, and while there's still a heavily Portuguese nautical theme going on, it's not too kitschy. The overall atmosphere is really nice, I gotta say. The staff is attentive and friendly, and the food- I get torradinhas de camarão, or shrimp toast, and galinha à africana- is great. The recipe for galinha à africana is printed on the placemats and is nearly identical to the one I've followed since I started cooking the dish at home, but there's no mistaking the difference between mine and Henri's. The restaurant's version achieves an amazing balance of coconut and peanut flavors, with the finely-minced shallot and garlic providing a perfect texture and the paprika giving everything a smoky background and lovely red hue.
Suffice to say that I leave contented, and set off up Barra hill to walk off the meal and see the Palacete de Santa Sancha and the surrounding neighborhood, which includes the former Hotel Bela Vista, now the residence of the Consul-Geral de Portugal em Macau e Hong Kong. I walk by a woman offering treats to a stray cat in a tree, which makes me smile. (The cat was on his way down by the time I passed.) There's hardly anyone around save cops on guard duty outside of Santa Sancha and a couple other buildings, and everything is quiet. In short, it's readily apparent that I'm in a wealthy neighborhood, but not once do I feel like I'm being eyeballed or hustled along, nor do I get the impression that the locals with whom I share the street are, either.
When I get back to campus I expect to hear from Calvin and his pals about getting together to drink wine, which we discussed earlier in the day, but no dice. I figure I missed my chance, and then, around 11:30, there's knocking at my door, and I hear Calvin and his friends talking in Cantonese. I'm already in bed, so I ignore them. I'm too old to start drinking at midnight, man, good as it sounds, which honestly ain't that good.
Later, folks. Expect one more update before I get home, probably from Hong Kong.
Friday, July 24, 2015
Curso de Verão: Update #5
7.24.15
So there's a student in the Portuguese program, Rafaela, who's from Hangzhou and likes to tease me about not being social enough, going so far as to have called me boring for not participating in the Portuguese folk dance classes offered every Tuesday and Thursday. There's nothing mean-spirited about it, and we always speak in Portuguese, filling in gaps in Mandarin as needed, so I don't mind her needling. Anyway, on Thursday evening my suitemate Eason (yet another misspelling/misunderstanding on my part), who's from Macau, invites me to eat Portuguese food at a place in the Areia Preta/Mong-Ha neighborhood, which is situated in the northern part of town, and says that Rafaela is coming with us. The look on her face when she sees me follow Eason out of the elevator and announce that I'm tagging along is priceless.
We take the bus to Praça Ferreira Amaral, then catch another one that crawls up to the Terminal Marítimo do Porto Exterior, where all the ferries from Hong Kong come in, past the city reservoir, and through a stretch of looming industrial buildings and residential towers that started being built around the middle of the last century, if memory serves me right. Eason points out that the various "associações desportivos" (or something along those lines- I can't recall the exact phrase), for which one sees signs around town, are probably fronts for the triads.
O Porto, which is the name of the restaurant, reminds me of A Vencedora, but a lot smaller and with way more Portuguese football memorabilia on the walls. There's a group of Portuguese dudes out front, smoking and drinking beer and shooting the shit, and the clientele seems pretty family-oriented. I don't think Rafaela's eaten Portuguese food before, so we order a few different things and share them: morcela (I don't tell either of my dining companions that it's made with blood), pastéis de bacalhau, braised oxtail, and bacalhau à Brás, which was new to me and should have been too much salt cod and potato after the pastéis, but was just plain delicious. The meal runs us around 450 patacas, or twenty bucks each- not great, but not terrible. I ate lunch at me and Tracey's favorite, Solmar, earlier in the day, and a meal of pastéis de bacalhau, galinha à africana, and a beer cost me a shocking 300 patacas. While it ain't the best, the food in the canteen is lookin' better and better just by virtue of its price.
Eason's arranged a meeting with someone whose importance I don't quite understand, and insists that going by her place at 9:30 at night is perfectly copacetic. Rafaela and I are both tired, and of course it's way too warm and humid out, which only compounds the problem of exhaustion, but he insists we come along, which involves a slightly less snail-paced bus ride. (Eason informs me that said route is his favorite, because the hilly nature of the route makes it "like a rollercoaster". I concur, though I've never been on such a slow rollercoaster. Fun fact: the Portuguese term for rollercoaster is "montanha russa," or "Russian mountain.") We get off near the Igreja de São Lourenço and wander around until our contact, who I finally learn is a Portuguese folk dance teacher, shows up. When she does, it's with a guy who reminds me of a Lusitanian Tim Robbins in tow, and she lets us into the building and onto the premises of the Grupo de Danças e Cantares de Macau. Here I was thinking I'd be intruding on some poor woman's evening at home, but instead I'm in a series of low-ceilinged rooms with parquet floors, one of which contains a dancefloor and another a wide variety of traditional Portuguese costumes. It remains unclear as to why I'm here, but I play along and talk a bit in Portuguese with a local woman who says their group is going to Portugal in August.
Eason says that people in Macau are lazy about walking, and proves it by insisting we take another meandering bus to get back to Praça Ferreira Amaral. I balk at that shit. Neither he nor Rafaela knows where we are, but I do, so I lead us on foot past the Palácio do Governo and the Grand Emperor Hotel to where we need to be, which takes less than ten minutes. Eason promptly falls asleep on the bus, Rafaela and I compare notes on our respective classes, and then we're back at the Universidade de Macau. It's been a pleasant little adventure, and having some company makes for a nice change.
It's Friday afternoon now, and I think I'll spend it and the evening reading. I want to finish As Portas do Cerco before I leave Macau. Tomorrow morning we're going to tour the historic city center with someone from the Instituto Cultural, followed by lunch; after that, Professor Cavalheiro and yours truly are going to visit Camilo Pessanha's grave. I suspect I'll end up spending the remainder of the afternoon in town as well, so I'd better spare my poor corpse any undue wear any tear until then.
Até logo, caros leitores.
So there's a student in the Portuguese program, Rafaela, who's from Hangzhou and likes to tease me about not being social enough, going so far as to have called me boring for not participating in the Portuguese folk dance classes offered every Tuesday and Thursday. There's nothing mean-spirited about it, and we always speak in Portuguese, filling in gaps in Mandarin as needed, so I don't mind her needling. Anyway, on Thursday evening my suitemate Eason (yet another misspelling/misunderstanding on my part), who's from Macau, invites me to eat Portuguese food at a place in the Areia Preta/Mong-Ha neighborhood, which is situated in the northern part of town, and says that Rafaela is coming with us. The look on her face when she sees me follow Eason out of the elevator and announce that I'm tagging along is priceless.
We take the bus to Praça Ferreira Amaral, then catch another one that crawls up to the Terminal Marítimo do Porto Exterior, where all the ferries from Hong Kong come in, past the city reservoir, and through a stretch of looming industrial buildings and residential towers that started being built around the middle of the last century, if memory serves me right. Eason points out that the various "associações desportivos" (or something along those lines- I can't recall the exact phrase), for which one sees signs around town, are probably fronts for the triads.
O Porto, which is the name of the restaurant, reminds me of A Vencedora, but a lot smaller and with way more Portuguese football memorabilia on the walls. There's a group of Portuguese dudes out front, smoking and drinking beer and shooting the shit, and the clientele seems pretty family-oriented. I don't think Rafaela's eaten Portuguese food before, so we order a few different things and share them: morcela (I don't tell either of my dining companions that it's made with blood), pastéis de bacalhau, braised oxtail, and bacalhau à Brás, which was new to me and should have been too much salt cod and potato after the pastéis, but was just plain delicious. The meal runs us around 450 patacas, or twenty bucks each- not great, but not terrible. I ate lunch at me and Tracey's favorite, Solmar, earlier in the day, and a meal of pastéis de bacalhau, galinha à africana, and a beer cost me a shocking 300 patacas. While it ain't the best, the food in the canteen is lookin' better and better just by virtue of its price.
Eason's arranged a meeting with someone whose importance I don't quite understand, and insists that going by her place at 9:30 at night is perfectly copacetic. Rafaela and I are both tired, and of course it's way too warm and humid out, which only compounds the problem of exhaustion, but he insists we come along, which involves a slightly less snail-paced bus ride. (Eason informs me that said route is his favorite, because the hilly nature of the route makes it "like a rollercoaster". I concur, though I've never been on such a slow rollercoaster. Fun fact: the Portuguese term for rollercoaster is "montanha russa," or "Russian mountain.") We get off near the Igreja de São Lourenço and wander around until our contact, who I finally learn is a Portuguese folk dance teacher, shows up. When she does, it's with a guy who reminds me of a Lusitanian Tim Robbins in tow, and she lets us into the building and onto the premises of the Grupo de Danças e Cantares de Macau. Here I was thinking I'd be intruding on some poor woman's evening at home, but instead I'm in a series of low-ceilinged rooms with parquet floors, one of which contains a dancefloor and another a wide variety of traditional Portuguese costumes. It remains unclear as to why I'm here, but I play along and talk a bit in Portuguese with a local woman who says their group is going to Portugal in August.
Eason says that people in Macau are lazy about walking, and proves it by insisting we take another meandering bus to get back to Praça Ferreira Amaral. I balk at that shit. Neither he nor Rafaela knows where we are, but I do, so I lead us on foot past the Palácio do Governo and the Grand Emperor Hotel to where we need to be, which takes less than ten minutes. Eason promptly falls asleep on the bus, Rafaela and I compare notes on our respective classes, and then we're back at the Universidade de Macau. It's been a pleasant little adventure, and having some company makes for a nice change.
It's Friday afternoon now, and I think I'll spend it and the evening reading. I want to finish As Portas do Cerco before I leave Macau. Tomorrow morning we're going to tour the historic city center with someone from the Instituto Cultural, followed by lunch; after that, Professor Cavalheiro and yours truly are going to visit Camilo Pessanha's grave. I suspect I'll end up spending the remainder of the afternoon in town as well, so I'd better spare my poor corpse any undue wear any tear until then.
Até logo, caros leitores.
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Curso de Verão: Update #4
7.20.15 (evening)
By the time I finish writing my last entry it's 3:30, the rain had long since stopped, there's was no word from Darren or Calvin (AKA Kelvin, as I originally misheard his name) about fresh plans to go to Coloane, and I don't feel like hanging around on campus for the rest of the day. The sky is still overcast and the temperature isn't unbearable, so I grab my Olympus OM-10 and get on the bus to Praça Ferreira Amaral, the beating heart of Macau's public transit network. The statue of the one-armed governor- who upon his arrival in Macau banished the traditional Chinese authorities in order to make the place a proper Portuguese colony, and who was soon thereafter murdered for his trouble- has been gone for years, leaving plenty of space for the dozens of buses that disgorge and swallow up passengers from all over the city 18 hours a day.
While nobody deserves to be beheaded and mutilated, Ferreira Amaral strikes me as an embodiment as the worst kind of 19th century colonial chauvinism. Granted, I don't know what orders he had from Lisbon, nor can I posthumously read his mind, but Macau had survived for almost three centuries under Chinese sufferance without too much interference from Portugal. But hey, why let a relatively good thing continue when you can flex your atrophied imperial muscles in the face of growing British competition, and rub the noses of the Chinese in it too?
Anyway, enough about Ferreira Amaral, whose statue now inhabits a meager park in one of Lisbon's eastern suburbs. I set out on a generally southwest course along the Avenida da Praia Grande, wishing I'd been able to see it before the quote-unquote progress of the mid-'90s split the Baia da Praia Grande into the Lagos de Sai Van and Nam Van, with the leftovers being filled in to accomodate Macau's need for more land. Tracey was lucky enough to visit Macau before that happened, and I envy her for it; fortunately, once I get far enough south, the aterros end, and while the barriers and bridges that make up the respective lakes are still visible, along with the fringe of land along their southern curve that houses the Macau Tower and far too much car-infested real estate, the atmosphere is much different than the overwhelming urban bustle a mere five minutes' walk away. The Avenida da República, which conforms to the northern and western edges of Sai Van, is a downright treat to stroll at five-something in the afternoon, even when I nearly lose my camera's lens cap in the water when I sit down on the barragem to change film.
The historic center of Macau is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and rightfully so, but I find myself more interested these days in the city's less magnificent architecture, specifically mid- to late-20th century residential buildings. There's something about many of Macau's edifícios/大廈 that I find appealing, despite most of them being conventially ugly, or at best utilitarian in appearance. Features like gracefully curved iron bars over semicircular balconies and windows, the latter of which are shielded from rain by arched tile or brick overhangs; the way the color schemes of the buildings have changed with age and increasing pollution; the small square tiles used to cover vast amounts of vertical square footage; the ubiquitous nameplates in gold ink on oxblood marble seen over so many main entrances: I love it all. When I first came to Macau three years ago all I saw was Hong Kong's rattier cousin with some old Portuguese buildings here and there, an assessment that still holds true in many ways (not that HK isn't bursting at the seams with its own brand of shabbiness, which isn't much different than Macau's), but I've come to appreciate the city's appearance in a wholly different way, one that doesn't rely on the UNESCO-approved parts of town for its justification.
It's a really good walk, capped off by getting briefly lost in the labyrinthine streets east of the Porto Interior and south of Avenida Almeida Ribeiro/San Ma Lou/新馬路. I consider going to Caravela or Terra for coffee, but there's no reason to spend the money. Back to the Universidade, and an early bedtime, it is.
7.22.15
Tuesday is plagued by almost continual rain, so I spend my time holed up in the dorm or at the library, reading and writing. I think the extremely hot days I encountered when I first got here were unusual, since the temperature as of late has been more manageable, though it's been no less humid. Maybe it's because they're smart enough to use umbrellas as parasols, but I swear I haven't seen any of the Chinese girls here sweat. Me, I've probably got salt deposits along the seams of all my shirts.
I'm currently reading two novels in Portuguese, the aforementioned library copy of As Portas do Cerco and Era Uma Vez em Goa, by Paulo Varela Gomes. The latter book is one I saw in a Lisbon bookstore earlier this year but didn't buy, and is also the example I used earlier in my discussion of prices in Macau. While it was more expensive than I'd have preferred, I don't regret buying it, because it's a real pleasure to read. My Portuguese has gotten decent enough for me to begin appreciating different writing styles, albeit in a rather superficial way, but even so the difference between these two books is like night and day. When I need a break from the language of Camões (a typically Portuguese way of referring to their language; if English-speakers have an equivalent and call their tongue the "language of Shakespeare" on a regular basis, I'm unaware of it), I re-read Thomas Pynchon's awesome, hilarious Inherent Vice or a collection of Elmore Leonard's Western stories, which are a little too similar to one another but quite well-written.
We have the declamação de poesia this morning after our first two-hour block of classes. Students from every turma participate, and since a collection of Portuguese poetry was handed out last week there's some repetition of what people recite. Overall, however, I'm impressed by everyone's performance, and by the fact that so many people get up to read poems, since that shit ain't easy even if you're reading someone else's work. I barely remember reading mine because it's over so fast; a link to the poem is below if you want to read it. Everyone gets a certificate of participation (the most substantial compensation I'll probably ever receive related to poetry) and the best readings get prizes. Said prizes are volumes of poetry by Yao Feng, the pen name of Yao Jingming, who teaches here at the Universidade and reads us some of his work. I've read some of his poetry before, and his newest book is on sale at the Livraria Portuguesa. When I go back I'll probably pick it up (a phrase I'll be using repeatedly in the coming days, methinks).
In the auditorium where the declamação is held I end up sitting next to Gertrudes, the young lady from Timor-Leste. This is the first time we get to talk at length, and I'm glad I have the chance. I don't think she's left campus very much, so I'd like to invite her and some other folks, including my Macanese suitemate, into doing some sightseeing and/or eating dinner. Her Portuguese is quite good, and while her native language, Tetum, has a lot of Portuguese loanwords, she tells me that speaking Portuguese in Timor, even at university, is seen as strange and possibly hazardous to one's ability to maintain their mother tongue. That's understandable, I suppose, but she also mentions that English is the language folks really want to learn, for all the same boring reasons everyone wants to learn it. I understand those reasons, and I'm inevitably being hardheaded and snobbish when I say that I'd much rather see a world wherein English (or any one language, really) doesn't play such a dominant role. It's the same reason I don't like seeing the encroachment of simplified Chinese writing and spoken Mandarin in Macau and Hong Kong, or the frequent, unnecessary acordos ortográficos da lingua portuguesa: humans are flexible enough to put up with shit like different spellings or pronunciations, and monoculture does nobody except the worst of us any favors. I fear that I'm fighting a rearguard action, however- but instead of throwing up my hands I do something, anything, to maintain the diversity of things as they currently are. That means embarrassing myself by speaking shitty Cantonese instead of embarrassing myself by speaking shitty Mandarin, demanding that os colegas do curso de verão falam português comigo, using patacas instead of Hong Kong dollars, and so on.
Não entendo por que a lusofonia é tão importante para mim, mas é. É possível que no próximo ano estarei fixo numa outra língua, ou talvez preocupado inteiramente com outro assunto. Tais possibilidades não me incomodam; são facetas da vida inquisitiva. Não, o que me importa neste momento é aproveitar esta oportunidade, esta imersão na língua e cultura portuguesas, e isso é precisamente que vou fazer, aqui na margem desta território que até 1999 era a Cidade do Santo Nome de Deus de Macau, Não Há Outra Mais Leal, mas agora tem o nome menos memorável de Região Administrativa Especial de Macau da República Popular da China. Não precisa de Deus para fazer esta cidade um lugar único, mas precisa de pessoas, e enquanto estou aqui, tentarei ser uma daquelas.
"Segredo" de Carlos Drummond de Andrade:
http://www.escritas.org/pt/poema/1783/segredo
By the time I finish writing my last entry it's 3:30, the rain had long since stopped, there's was no word from Darren or Calvin (AKA Kelvin, as I originally misheard his name) about fresh plans to go to Coloane, and I don't feel like hanging around on campus for the rest of the day. The sky is still overcast and the temperature isn't unbearable, so I grab my Olympus OM-10 and get on the bus to Praça Ferreira Amaral, the beating heart of Macau's public transit network. The statue of the one-armed governor- who upon his arrival in Macau banished the traditional Chinese authorities in order to make the place a proper Portuguese colony, and who was soon thereafter murdered for his trouble- has been gone for years, leaving plenty of space for the dozens of buses that disgorge and swallow up passengers from all over the city 18 hours a day.
While nobody deserves to be beheaded and mutilated, Ferreira Amaral strikes me as an embodiment as the worst kind of 19th century colonial chauvinism. Granted, I don't know what orders he had from Lisbon, nor can I posthumously read his mind, but Macau had survived for almost three centuries under Chinese sufferance without too much interference from Portugal. But hey, why let a relatively good thing continue when you can flex your atrophied imperial muscles in the face of growing British competition, and rub the noses of the Chinese in it too?
Anyway, enough about Ferreira Amaral, whose statue now inhabits a meager park in one of Lisbon's eastern suburbs. I set out on a generally southwest course along the Avenida da Praia Grande, wishing I'd been able to see it before the quote-unquote progress of the mid-'90s split the Baia da Praia Grande into the Lagos de Sai Van and Nam Van, with the leftovers being filled in to accomodate Macau's need for more land. Tracey was lucky enough to visit Macau before that happened, and I envy her for it; fortunately, once I get far enough south, the aterros end, and while the barriers and bridges that make up the respective lakes are still visible, along with the fringe of land along their southern curve that houses the Macau Tower and far too much car-infested real estate, the atmosphere is much different than the overwhelming urban bustle a mere five minutes' walk away. The Avenida da República, which conforms to the northern and western edges of Sai Van, is a downright treat to stroll at five-something in the afternoon, even when I nearly lose my camera's lens cap in the water when I sit down on the barragem to change film.
The historic center of Macau is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and rightfully so, but I find myself more interested these days in the city's less magnificent architecture, specifically mid- to late-20th century residential buildings. There's something about many of Macau's edifícios/大廈 that I find appealing, despite most of them being conventially ugly, or at best utilitarian in appearance. Features like gracefully curved iron bars over semicircular balconies and windows, the latter of which are shielded from rain by arched tile or brick overhangs; the way the color schemes of the buildings have changed with age and increasing pollution; the small square tiles used to cover vast amounts of vertical square footage; the ubiquitous nameplates in gold ink on oxblood marble seen over so many main entrances: I love it all. When I first came to Macau three years ago all I saw was Hong Kong's rattier cousin with some old Portuguese buildings here and there, an assessment that still holds true in many ways (not that HK isn't bursting at the seams with its own brand of shabbiness, which isn't much different than Macau's), but I've come to appreciate the city's appearance in a wholly different way, one that doesn't rely on the UNESCO-approved parts of town for its justification.
It's a really good walk, capped off by getting briefly lost in the labyrinthine streets east of the Porto Interior and south of Avenida Almeida Ribeiro/San Ma Lou/新馬路. I consider going to Caravela or Terra for coffee, but there's no reason to spend the money. Back to the Universidade, and an early bedtime, it is.
7.22.15
Tuesday is plagued by almost continual rain, so I spend my time holed up in the dorm or at the library, reading and writing. I think the extremely hot days I encountered when I first got here were unusual, since the temperature as of late has been more manageable, though it's been no less humid. Maybe it's because they're smart enough to use umbrellas as parasols, but I swear I haven't seen any of the Chinese girls here sweat. Me, I've probably got salt deposits along the seams of all my shirts.
I'm currently reading two novels in Portuguese, the aforementioned library copy of As Portas do Cerco and Era Uma Vez em Goa, by Paulo Varela Gomes. The latter book is one I saw in a Lisbon bookstore earlier this year but didn't buy, and is also the example I used earlier in my discussion of prices in Macau. While it was more expensive than I'd have preferred, I don't regret buying it, because it's a real pleasure to read. My Portuguese has gotten decent enough for me to begin appreciating different writing styles, albeit in a rather superficial way, but even so the difference between these two books is like night and day. When I need a break from the language of Camões (a typically Portuguese way of referring to their language; if English-speakers have an equivalent and call their tongue the "language of Shakespeare" on a regular basis, I'm unaware of it), I re-read Thomas Pynchon's awesome, hilarious Inherent Vice or a collection of Elmore Leonard's Western stories, which are a little too similar to one another but quite well-written.
We have the declamação de poesia this morning after our first two-hour block of classes. Students from every turma participate, and since a collection of Portuguese poetry was handed out last week there's some repetition of what people recite. Overall, however, I'm impressed by everyone's performance, and by the fact that so many people get up to read poems, since that shit ain't easy even if you're reading someone else's work. I barely remember reading mine because it's over so fast; a link to the poem is below if you want to read it. Everyone gets a certificate of participation (the most substantial compensation I'll probably ever receive related to poetry) and the best readings get prizes. Said prizes are volumes of poetry by Yao Feng, the pen name of Yao Jingming, who teaches here at the Universidade and reads us some of his work. I've read some of his poetry before, and his newest book is on sale at the Livraria Portuguesa. When I go back I'll probably pick it up (a phrase I'll be using repeatedly in the coming days, methinks).
In the auditorium where the declamação is held I end up sitting next to Gertrudes, the young lady from Timor-Leste. This is the first time we get to talk at length, and I'm glad I have the chance. I don't think she's left campus very much, so I'd like to invite her and some other folks, including my Macanese suitemate, into doing some sightseeing and/or eating dinner. Her Portuguese is quite good, and while her native language, Tetum, has a lot of Portuguese loanwords, she tells me that speaking Portuguese in Timor, even at university, is seen as strange and possibly hazardous to one's ability to maintain their mother tongue. That's understandable, I suppose, but she also mentions that English is the language folks really want to learn, for all the same boring reasons everyone wants to learn it. I understand those reasons, and I'm inevitably being hardheaded and snobbish when I say that I'd much rather see a world wherein English (or any one language, really) doesn't play such a dominant role. It's the same reason I don't like seeing the encroachment of simplified Chinese writing and spoken Mandarin in Macau and Hong Kong, or the frequent, unnecessary acordos ortográficos da lingua portuguesa: humans are flexible enough to put up with shit like different spellings or pronunciations, and monoculture does nobody except the worst of us any favors. I fear that I'm fighting a rearguard action, however- but instead of throwing up my hands I do something, anything, to maintain the diversity of things as they currently are. That means embarrassing myself by speaking shitty Cantonese instead of embarrassing myself by speaking shitty Mandarin, demanding that os colegas do curso de verão falam português comigo, using patacas instead of Hong Kong dollars, and so on.
Não entendo por que a lusofonia é tão importante para mim, mas é. É possível que no próximo ano estarei fixo numa outra língua, ou talvez preocupado inteiramente com outro assunto. Tais possibilidades não me incomodam; são facetas da vida inquisitiva. Não, o que me importa neste momento é aproveitar esta oportunidade, esta imersão na língua e cultura portuguesas, e isso é precisamente que vou fazer, aqui na margem desta território que até 1999 era a Cidade do Santo Nome de Deus de Macau, Não Há Outra Mais Leal, mas agora tem o nome menos memorável de Região Administrativa Especial de Macau da República Popular da China. Não precisa de Deus para fazer esta cidade um lugar único, mas precisa de pessoas, e enquanto estou aqui, tentarei ser uma daquelas.
"Segredo" de Carlos Drummond de Andrade:
http://www.escritas.org/pt/poema/1783/segredo
Monday, July 20, 2015
Curso de Verão: Update #3
7.20.15
It took me a few days, but I figured out that the university is laid out in a pretty clever way that minimizes the amount of time you have to spend in the sun or rain (the latter has finally started, and usually arrives in the afternoon but doesn't last terribly long). There are covered arcades linking most of the buildings, but in many cases they're only useful if you have the time or inclination to do so, since they're rarely the fastest route between two given points. Still, they're really nice to have.
I passed the weekend pretty quietly. I went back to the Livraria Portuguesa on Saturday and had coffee at Caravela, but that was it; on Sunday morning I climbed the Colina da Guia to visit the old chapel and lighthouse there. There's a nice park and jogging trail incorporated into the hill itself, and the lighthouse afforded a pretty good view of the city, albeit one somewhat obscured by haze and tall buildings. I could spot certain landmarks anyway- Tap Seac, slivers of the Porto Interior, the Cemitério de São Miguel- and the experience of climbing the narrow, twisting lighthouse steps reminded me of when Tracey and I visited the Torre de Belém in Lisbon earlier this year. On the way back home, soaked in sweat and devoid of the will to do much of anything, I ate lunch at A Vencedora (not bad this time, but I ordered badly; I'd forgotten that arroz chau-chau is basically fried rice with some random stuff in it) and rested a little in the Jardim de São Francisco, which is close to the Hotel Lisboa and the Clube Militar and decorated in the same shade of pink as the latter. Then I spent the rest of the day reading, doing homework, and dozing off.
Prices here lean toward the expensive, but are also just strange. Take the Livraria Portuguesa, for instance: for almost twice what you'd pay in Lisbon (which would be, say, 13 euros) you can get an book of average length printed in Portugal, while a boxed set of four dense volumes of Macau history published by a local outfit translates to a pretty reasonable $75 American. An espresso at Caravela is 15 patacas, or two bucks, about what it'd be at home; meanwhile, a large coffee on campus (if you can wait until 11 to go there, since it's the only coffee shop in the history of coffee consumption to not be open first thing in the damned morning) is 26.6 patacas- again, similar to US prices, but quite steep by local standards: I can eat lunch at A Vencedora for about 70 patacas, for example. The bus is pretty affordable, thankfully, with the most expensive round trip you can take being something like 13 patacas, or less than two bucks. (It's even cheaper with a Macau Pass.) Pastéis de nata, or the Portuguese egg tarts for which Macau is famous and which I still haven't eaten on this trip, run about eight patacas, or a dollar, each. I haven't looked at the prices of staples in any of the markets yet, but I'd wager that they're higher than they are on the mainland China side of the Portas do Cerco. I also get the impression that renting, much less buying, real estate is horrifically expensive, but the Chinese habit of writing 萬 (10,000) instead of Arabic numerals imparts a certain kind of sticker shock to begin with: "200萬? Holy shit, that's a lot of zeros, and now I gotta convert the currency..."
My former roommate and his friends invited me to go walk around Coloane this afternoon, but canceled their plans due to rain. I've been meaning to get down to Coloane village and thence to the famed Restaurante de Fernando on 黑沙/Hac Sa beach, and it'd be nice to do something with somebody for once. I haven't really gotten lonely at all, or unbearably homesick, but I get the feeling that a lot of my fellow students aren't getting out and seeing much of Macau, so it'd be fun to tag along with them. The cost of doing anything has to be a significant barrier to, well, doing anything: if I'm trying to be careful with money even in my fortunate position, I can only imagine how much harder it has to be for a college kid from the mainland.
That's about it for now, folks. I'll write more later.
It took me a few days, but I figured out that the university is laid out in a pretty clever way that minimizes the amount of time you have to spend in the sun or rain (the latter has finally started, and usually arrives in the afternoon but doesn't last terribly long). There are covered arcades linking most of the buildings, but in many cases they're only useful if you have the time or inclination to do so, since they're rarely the fastest route between two given points. Still, they're really nice to have.
I passed the weekend pretty quietly. I went back to the Livraria Portuguesa on Saturday and had coffee at Caravela, but that was it; on Sunday morning I climbed the Colina da Guia to visit the old chapel and lighthouse there. There's a nice park and jogging trail incorporated into the hill itself, and the lighthouse afforded a pretty good view of the city, albeit one somewhat obscured by haze and tall buildings. I could spot certain landmarks anyway- Tap Seac, slivers of the Porto Interior, the Cemitério de São Miguel- and the experience of climbing the narrow, twisting lighthouse steps reminded me of when Tracey and I visited the Torre de Belém in Lisbon earlier this year. On the way back home, soaked in sweat and devoid of the will to do much of anything, I ate lunch at A Vencedora (not bad this time, but I ordered badly; I'd forgotten that arroz chau-chau is basically fried rice with some random stuff in it) and rested a little in the Jardim de São Francisco, which is close to the Hotel Lisboa and the Clube Militar and decorated in the same shade of pink as the latter. Then I spent the rest of the day reading, doing homework, and dozing off.
Prices here lean toward the expensive, but are also just strange. Take the Livraria Portuguesa, for instance: for almost twice what you'd pay in Lisbon (which would be, say, 13 euros) you can get an book of average length printed in Portugal, while a boxed set of four dense volumes of Macau history published by a local outfit translates to a pretty reasonable $75 American. An espresso at Caravela is 15 patacas, or two bucks, about what it'd be at home; meanwhile, a large coffee on campus (if you can wait until 11 to go there, since it's the only coffee shop in the history of coffee consumption to not be open first thing in the damned morning) is 26.6 patacas- again, similar to US prices, but quite steep by local standards: I can eat lunch at A Vencedora for about 70 patacas, for example. The bus is pretty affordable, thankfully, with the most expensive round trip you can take being something like 13 patacas, or less than two bucks. (It's even cheaper with a Macau Pass.) Pastéis de nata, or the Portuguese egg tarts for which Macau is famous and which I still haven't eaten on this trip, run about eight patacas, or a dollar, each. I haven't looked at the prices of staples in any of the markets yet, but I'd wager that they're higher than they are on the mainland China side of the Portas do Cerco. I also get the impression that renting, much less buying, real estate is horrifically expensive, but the Chinese habit of writing 萬 (10,000) instead of Arabic numerals imparts a certain kind of sticker shock to begin with: "200萬? Holy shit, that's a lot of zeros, and now I gotta convert the currency..."
My former roommate and his friends invited me to go walk around Coloane this afternoon, but canceled their plans due to rain. I've been meaning to get down to Coloane village and thence to the famed Restaurante de Fernando on 黑沙/Hac Sa beach, and it'd be nice to do something with somebody for once. I haven't really gotten lonely at all, or unbearably homesick, but I get the feeling that a lot of my fellow students aren't getting out and seeing much of Macau, so it'd be fun to tag along with them. The cost of doing anything has to be a significant barrier to, well, doing anything: if I'm trying to be careful with money even in my fortunate position, I can only imagine how much harder it has to be for a college kid from the mainland.
That's about it for now, folks. I'll write more later.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Curso de Verão: Update #2
7.15.15
I spent the first block of classes today- we technically have two classes each morning, though it seems like a formality- watching what I thought was going to be a Portuguese film but turned out to be French: "A Gaiola Dourada" is really "La Cage Dorée". 95% of the movie is in French, but it was subtitled in Portuguese, which probably confused a lot of people. I was thankful for the subtitles, because if it had been completely in Portuguese there's no way I would have been able to follow the movie well enough to take a quiz on it afterward.
Today was also the first of our afternoons spent visiting museums. I ended up on the bus headed to the Museu Marítimo, while I think I signed up for the trip to the Centro de Ciência. I didn't feel bad about this- I was less than thrilled about going to what I imagine is a generic science museum- and I doubt my being on the bus cost anyone a desperately-desired trip to the Museu Marítimo. If it did, then desculpe, colega.
I told myself last night that I'd take it easy today in terms of walking, but I didn't. The first afternoon showers rolled in just as we got to the museum, cooling things off a little, and when I was done at the museum I went off up the Rua da Barra and finally got to see the Quartel dos Mouros, as well as a couple wonderfully decrepit old lanes around the Largo do Lilau. I was tempted to visit the church and seminary of São José, which I think was the haunt of Padre Manuel Teixeira, but I felt somewhat underdressed- not that anyone would care, but still- and it's close enough to the Largo do Senado that visiting at a later date won't be any problem. I ended my trek by eating a 豬扒包, or pork chop bun (the best one I've had yet), and going around the corner to Caravela again for a cold beer and a leisurely perusal of 澳門平台/Plataforma, a bilingual Portuguese-Chinese newspaper. In addition to the usual stuff it also publishes poetry, which earns it high marks in my book. Then it was back on the MT3U to the ol' Universidade.
My complaints about the Macau Corner in the UM library have, as I suspected, turned out to be unfounded. There are the locked cases I mentioned, as well as a good chunk of stacks of books in Portuguese, Chinese, and English. I only barely skimmed them and found enough to keep me busy indefinitely, and enough to obviate the need for a trip to the Arquivo Histórico. For the time being I've settled on a long out of print novel, António Rebordão Navarro's As Portas do Cerco, that I've been wanting to read for a while. Like everywhere else on campus, the library is currently a ghost town, which makes for good reading.
Had some good chats with a couple of the professors at different times today. I still need to drop by Professor Cavalheiro's office and schedule that trip to the cemetery where Pessanha is buried. Right now, however, I have to go get my laundry out of the washing machine. I went to check on it a little while ago and found the floor half-submerged. In yet another example of what's either Chinese ingenuity or laziness, or probably some of both, the washer's drainage tube doesn't connect to anything, since there's a drain in the floor less than a foot away; and even though it'll take a while and turn the room into a slippery death trap in the meantime, why not just let the water go down the drain?
At the very least, shit like this guarantees I won't be bored anytime soon.
7.17.15
So much for not mocking the slapdash construction of this university. The interior side of our door's lock mechanism- which requires a keycard- was barely attached when I got here, and sometime yesterday it gave up the ghost entirely. Rather than just falling off, however, it managed to render the door completely inoperable, which meant me and my roommate had to ask our suitmate to let us in through his room and the bathroom. After some wrangling, which included being told that I marked a checkbox on the maintenance form improperly (what the fuck), we were told we could move back in tomorrow and were put in temporary rooms for the night. Darren was in the room next to mine, along with Ethan, a guy from Macau whom I met not long after moving into my new digs. Ethan is friendly, studies medicine in Taiwan, and reminds me in several ways of my old friend Brad Plumb, who I didn't realized I missed as much as I did until now. Today I was informed that I could move back into my old room, but since I currently don't have a roommate, I don't think I will unless Darren is dying for company; I doubt that's the case.
This campus is a year old and already falling apart. It'll always be falling apart. I feel bad for students who don't have the luxury of bailing on it after three weeks, not just for the inconveniences they'll face, but for the fact that Macau is taking cues from the Mainland in its preference to build grandiose, disposable eyesores. (To be fair, Macau already has some experience in that field; one need only look at the Grand Lisboa.) This place is a massive investment in the territory's youth, who apparently don't deserve anything better than endless acres of unshaded concrete and pre-ruined facilities. It's a shame.
Fortunately, the human aspect of the university makes up for its infrastructural failings. Everyone I've talked to in the Department of Portuguese has been great, and I hope the staff in other departments is just as friendly and helpful. My professor, Leonor Seabra, is quite interesting, and that's just judging by her thirty-minute discourse on the history of Macau earlier this afternoon. The grammar part of class is a drag- when isn't it?- but the culture half is pretty solid, thanks to Professora Seabra's knowledge of the material. As it turns out, she's an historian, not a language teacher, and has been in Macau for a long while. (There's a link below about her, though it's in Portuguese.) I'll have to bend her ear after class one day. Doing a little more cursory research also shows that Jorge Cavalheiro, of whom I spoke before, also has quite the academic pedigtree in Macau. (Link also below.) I'm even more fortunate than I first realized!
I signed up next week to participate in the declamação de poesia, or poetry reading, since I'm very fond of poetry. Before I left Houston I picked up a bilingual edition of selected poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a famous Brazilian poet, and I've been kicking myself for not bringing it along. Fortunately I found an anthology of his work in the library, and one of the poems that struck me back home, "Segredo", is in this one, so that's what I'm going to read. I should read something by Camilo Pessanha since I'm in Macau, but screw it. It's funny how being in one place gives you a greater appreciation for another; in this case, it takes being away from Brazilians to realize how much of my Portuguese education I owe to them.
A girl named Gertrudes from Timor-Leste ended up in my class yesterday. Her Portuguese sounds good- more Brazilian than Portuguese- and I hope I get to talk to her more than I have. Timor is one of those Lusophone places I've read about but don't really know much about, save for some weird events a few hundred years ago and the general details of its turbulent post-independence history. The text on Gertrudes' t-shirt today advertised in Portuguese and Tetum the Arquivo & Museu da Resistência Timorense/Arkivu & Muzeu Rezisténsia Timorense, which sounds like a place worth seeing should I ever make it to Timor-Leste.
Let's see, what else. I've done a terrible job of giving myself much rest. Every day, almost as soon as classes are over and I've eaten lunch, I'm on the bus and out walking for the next few hours. I'm probably not eating enough, and when I do eat it's greasy canteen food or rich Portuguese or Macanese food. If I was going to be here for more than a few weeks I'd be concerned, but as it stands I think I can afford it. I'm being good today and not traipsing about all afternoon; I took the bus to Taipa, ate arroz de pato no forno (baked rice with duck) for lunch at Restaurante O Santos, and took the bus back to school. O Santos is a delicious, but not particularly cheap, Portuguese joint, unlike the very basic and very Macanese restaurant A Vencedora, where I had minchi for dinner last night. I heard almost as much Portuguese in there as I did Cantonese, and none of it was spoken by homens brancos like me. It was the reverse of O Santos, where I heard the Portuguese owner cheerfully conversing in Cantonese to some of his guests. That was pleasant; I love seeing proof of the continued existence of real Luso-Chinese ties.
Speaking of Taipa, or what was once Taipa since it lost its island status a while back when they filled in the land between it and Coloane to build more fuckin' casinos, the old village there is pretty charming, and not what I expected. I thought it'd be a little more open, but it's similar to Macau proper in that it's a network of narrow lanes and closely-packed buildings, with larger Portuguese edifices here and there. I visited the Casas-Museu de Taipa, which is a series of old Portuguese-style houses arranged in different ways: there's a typical Macanese interior from the turn of the 20th century in one house, a museum of Taipa/Coloane life in another, and displays of traditional Portuguese regional clothing in another. Oh, and I tried the pork chop bun at 大利來記 Tai Lei Loi Kei, which is rumored to have the best in Macau. I won't deny that it was damn good, but I liked the one I had the day before better. Tai Lei Loi Kei's came on a warm bun, which seemed like a good idea but sapped some of the fresh-outta-the-fryer quality from the pork chop.
It's Friday afternoon now, and I have no idea what I'm going to do tonight. In the morning I'm probably going to visit the Farol da Guia, which is the oldest lighthouse on the China coast and is scheduled to reopen to the public tomorrow. On top of the trek up the Colina da Guia I'll most likely have to deal with massive crowds, but so be it. When I get back down the hill I can go to the Bairro de São Lázaro, take in the architecture and find something tasty to eat, and then- who knows? All that's certain is that I'd better make the most of my time, even if it means walking until my legs ache and every age-displaced cobblestone feels like a dull blade against the soles of my shoes. When it gets that bad, it's good to know that a cold beer and a table at which to drink it is never very far away.
You may be wondering why I'm not writing this in Portuguese. 1) Most of my already limited audience doesn't read Portuguese; 2) I have to write enough in Portuguese for class as it is; and 3) I'm lazy, if you somehow forgot that.
Até próximo, caras.
Leonor Seabra:
http://www.revistamacau.com/2009/06/15/leonor-seabra-a-historiadora-que-encontrou-uma-casa-em-macau/
Jorge Cavalheiro:
http://macauantigo.blogspot.com/2011/06/homenagem-jorge-cavalheiro.html
I spent the first block of classes today- we technically have two classes each morning, though it seems like a formality- watching what I thought was going to be a Portuguese film but turned out to be French: "A Gaiola Dourada" is really "La Cage Dorée". 95% of the movie is in French, but it was subtitled in Portuguese, which probably confused a lot of people. I was thankful for the subtitles, because if it had been completely in Portuguese there's no way I would have been able to follow the movie well enough to take a quiz on it afterward.
Today was also the first of our afternoons spent visiting museums. I ended up on the bus headed to the Museu Marítimo, while I think I signed up for the trip to the Centro de Ciência. I didn't feel bad about this- I was less than thrilled about going to what I imagine is a generic science museum- and I doubt my being on the bus cost anyone a desperately-desired trip to the Museu Marítimo. If it did, then desculpe, colega.
I told myself last night that I'd take it easy today in terms of walking, but I didn't. The first afternoon showers rolled in just as we got to the museum, cooling things off a little, and when I was done at the museum I went off up the Rua da Barra and finally got to see the Quartel dos Mouros, as well as a couple wonderfully decrepit old lanes around the Largo do Lilau. I was tempted to visit the church and seminary of São José, which I think was the haunt of Padre Manuel Teixeira, but I felt somewhat underdressed- not that anyone would care, but still- and it's close enough to the Largo do Senado that visiting at a later date won't be any problem. I ended my trek by eating a 豬扒包, or pork chop bun (the best one I've had yet), and going around the corner to Caravela again for a cold beer and a leisurely perusal of 澳門平台/Plataforma, a bilingual Portuguese-Chinese newspaper. In addition to the usual stuff it also publishes poetry, which earns it high marks in my book. Then it was back on the MT3U to the ol' Universidade.
My complaints about the Macau Corner in the UM library have, as I suspected, turned out to be unfounded. There are the locked cases I mentioned, as well as a good chunk of stacks of books in Portuguese, Chinese, and English. I only barely skimmed them and found enough to keep me busy indefinitely, and enough to obviate the need for a trip to the Arquivo Histórico. For the time being I've settled on a long out of print novel, António Rebordão Navarro's As Portas do Cerco, that I've been wanting to read for a while. Like everywhere else on campus, the library is currently a ghost town, which makes for good reading.
Had some good chats with a couple of the professors at different times today. I still need to drop by Professor Cavalheiro's office and schedule that trip to the cemetery where Pessanha is buried. Right now, however, I have to go get my laundry out of the washing machine. I went to check on it a little while ago and found the floor half-submerged. In yet another example of what's either Chinese ingenuity or laziness, or probably some of both, the washer's drainage tube doesn't connect to anything, since there's a drain in the floor less than a foot away; and even though it'll take a while and turn the room into a slippery death trap in the meantime, why not just let the water go down the drain?
At the very least, shit like this guarantees I won't be bored anytime soon.
7.17.15
So much for not mocking the slapdash construction of this university. The interior side of our door's lock mechanism- which requires a keycard- was barely attached when I got here, and sometime yesterday it gave up the ghost entirely. Rather than just falling off, however, it managed to render the door completely inoperable, which meant me and my roommate had to ask our suitmate to let us in through his room and the bathroom. After some wrangling, which included being told that I marked a checkbox on the maintenance form improperly (what the fuck), we were told we could move back in tomorrow and were put in temporary rooms for the night. Darren was in the room next to mine, along with Ethan, a guy from Macau whom I met not long after moving into my new digs. Ethan is friendly, studies medicine in Taiwan, and reminds me in several ways of my old friend Brad Plumb, who I didn't realized I missed as much as I did until now. Today I was informed that I could move back into my old room, but since I currently don't have a roommate, I don't think I will unless Darren is dying for company; I doubt that's the case.
This campus is a year old and already falling apart. It'll always be falling apart. I feel bad for students who don't have the luxury of bailing on it after three weeks, not just for the inconveniences they'll face, but for the fact that Macau is taking cues from the Mainland in its preference to build grandiose, disposable eyesores. (To be fair, Macau already has some experience in that field; one need only look at the Grand Lisboa.) This place is a massive investment in the territory's youth, who apparently don't deserve anything better than endless acres of unshaded concrete and pre-ruined facilities. It's a shame.
Fortunately, the human aspect of the university makes up for its infrastructural failings. Everyone I've talked to in the Department of Portuguese has been great, and I hope the staff in other departments is just as friendly and helpful. My professor, Leonor Seabra, is quite interesting, and that's just judging by her thirty-minute discourse on the history of Macau earlier this afternoon. The grammar part of class is a drag- when isn't it?- but the culture half is pretty solid, thanks to Professora Seabra's knowledge of the material. As it turns out, she's an historian, not a language teacher, and has been in Macau for a long while. (There's a link below about her, though it's in Portuguese.) I'll have to bend her ear after class one day. Doing a little more cursory research also shows that Jorge Cavalheiro, of whom I spoke before, also has quite the academic pedigtree in Macau. (Link also below.) I'm even more fortunate than I first realized!
I signed up next week to participate in the declamação de poesia, or poetry reading, since I'm very fond of poetry. Before I left Houston I picked up a bilingual edition of selected poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a famous Brazilian poet, and I've been kicking myself for not bringing it along. Fortunately I found an anthology of his work in the library, and one of the poems that struck me back home, "Segredo", is in this one, so that's what I'm going to read. I should read something by Camilo Pessanha since I'm in Macau, but screw it. It's funny how being in one place gives you a greater appreciation for another; in this case, it takes being away from Brazilians to realize how much of my Portuguese education I owe to them.
A girl named Gertrudes from Timor-Leste ended up in my class yesterday. Her Portuguese sounds good- more Brazilian than Portuguese- and I hope I get to talk to her more than I have. Timor is one of those Lusophone places I've read about but don't really know much about, save for some weird events a few hundred years ago and the general details of its turbulent post-independence history. The text on Gertrudes' t-shirt today advertised in Portuguese and Tetum the Arquivo & Museu da Resistência Timorense/Arkivu & Muzeu Rezisténsia Timorense, which sounds like a place worth seeing should I ever make it to Timor-Leste.
Let's see, what else. I've done a terrible job of giving myself much rest. Every day, almost as soon as classes are over and I've eaten lunch, I'm on the bus and out walking for the next few hours. I'm probably not eating enough, and when I do eat it's greasy canteen food or rich Portuguese or Macanese food. If I was going to be here for more than a few weeks I'd be concerned, but as it stands I think I can afford it. I'm being good today and not traipsing about all afternoon; I took the bus to Taipa, ate arroz de pato no forno (baked rice with duck) for lunch at Restaurante O Santos, and took the bus back to school. O Santos is a delicious, but not particularly cheap, Portuguese joint, unlike the very basic and very Macanese restaurant A Vencedora, where I had minchi for dinner last night. I heard almost as much Portuguese in there as I did Cantonese, and none of it was spoken by homens brancos like me. It was the reverse of O Santos, where I heard the Portuguese owner cheerfully conversing in Cantonese to some of his guests. That was pleasant; I love seeing proof of the continued existence of real Luso-Chinese ties.
Speaking of Taipa, or what was once Taipa since it lost its island status a while back when they filled in the land between it and Coloane to build more fuckin' casinos, the old village there is pretty charming, and not what I expected. I thought it'd be a little more open, but it's similar to Macau proper in that it's a network of narrow lanes and closely-packed buildings, with larger Portuguese edifices here and there. I visited the Casas-Museu de Taipa, which is a series of old Portuguese-style houses arranged in different ways: there's a typical Macanese interior from the turn of the 20th century in one house, a museum of Taipa/Coloane life in another, and displays of traditional Portuguese regional clothing in another. Oh, and I tried the pork chop bun at 大利來記 Tai Lei Loi Kei, which is rumored to have the best in Macau. I won't deny that it was damn good, but I liked the one I had the day before better. Tai Lei Loi Kei's came on a warm bun, which seemed like a good idea but sapped some of the fresh-outta-the-fryer quality from the pork chop.
It's Friday afternoon now, and I have no idea what I'm going to do tonight. In the morning I'm probably going to visit the Farol da Guia, which is the oldest lighthouse on the China coast and is scheduled to reopen to the public tomorrow. On top of the trek up the Colina da Guia I'll most likely have to deal with massive crowds, but so be it. When I get back down the hill I can go to the Bairro de São Lázaro, take in the architecture and find something tasty to eat, and then- who knows? All that's certain is that I'd better make the most of my time, even if it means walking until my legs ache and every age-displaced cobblestone feels like a dull blade against the soles of my shoes. When it gets that bad, it's good to know that a cold beer and a table at which to drink it is never very far away.
You may be wondering why I'm not writing this in Portuguese. 1) Most of my already limited audience doesn't read Portuguese; 2) I have to write enough in Portuguese for class as it is; and 3) I'm lazy, if you somehow forgot that.
Até próximo, caras.
Leonor Seabra:
http://www.revistamacau.com/2009/06/15/leonor-seabra-a-historiadora-que-encontrou-uma-casa-em-macau/
Jorge Cavalheiro:
http://macauantigo.blogspot.com/2011/06/homenagem-jorge-cavalheiro.html
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Curso de Verão: Update #1
7.13.15
5:45 AM. Can't sleep; woke up around four-something. I'm in a common room down the hall from my room, which means I'm without air conditioning. This is going to be a regular occurrence, and I wonder how much more quickly I and these brand-new buildings are going to fall apart due to constant exposure to humidity. Whether or not that's a factor, you can already see things crumbling at the edges: that's what happens when a place this big is built so quickly.
The University of Macau's new campus houses 10,000 students; I'd wager it's big enough for three times that. Who knows if they'll ever reach that level of enrollment. The outsized buildings, the empty paths and streets (yes, it's summer, but I don't see this place ever feeling crowded, which is a first for China), the sluggish waterways and propped-up trees all lend to the feeling of hasty realization of grandiose plans. It's easy to mock the newborn ugliness of the place, but not really worth it. After all, better that all that casino money be spent on education instead of reclaiming more land to build more casinos, right?
That's how I see it, and being a short-term foreign student I'm in no position to divine the intentions of the Macau SAR and the University administration. All I can do is speculate wildly- or more likely halfheartedly, since it's too hot to do anything wildly- and pay attention to what I came here for: the 29th Annual Portuguese Language and Culture Summer Course.
My correspondence with Ana Nunes and Ricardo Moutinho, the coordinators of the XXIX Curso de Verão de Língua e Cultura Portuguesa, in the months leading up to my arrival in Macau was always informative and affable, despite a certain degree of bureaucratic feet-dragging leading up to the official announcement of the course. When I get to campus, drop my things off in my room (where my roommate's things are proof that he exists, though he isn't present), and head over to the Faculdade de Humanidades building, I'm pleased to discover that Professores Nunes and Moutinho are just as pleasant in person. I learn that I'm one of at least a couple hundred students, most of them mainland Chinese and one of whom I met on the bus to campus when he was short a couple patacas for bus fare and all I had was a coin more than twice the cost of mine (fares must be paid in exact change; a pain in the ass, which is why I got a Macau Pass ASAP). I'm ashamed to say that I can't recall his name right now, but he was pretty friendly, and his Portuguese was pretty good.
Waiting in line to get my student ID and meal tickets (free food is a real boon, but let's hope canteen food here is better than it was during my last foray into the world of overseas language programs four years ago), I can't put my finger on how well most of these kids know Portuguese, because they're all understandably speaking Mandarin to one another and often resort to English when talking to the coordinators. The lists in the hallway indicate that the advanced class is only fourteen people, while the intermediate, basic, and introductory classes all have over twice that number of students. I'm enrolled in the basic course with Professor Jorge Cavalheiro, whose beard, glasses, and demeanor- I pass him on his bike an hour later- is hard evidence of there being a universal archetype of college professors. I talk to him briefly about possibly changing classes, since I'm unsure whether I'm better suited to the intermediate level, and he says we'll sort it out tomorrow, once he gets a feel for the overall proficiency level of the class.
With logistics more or less taken care of- less, really, since there's a heretofore unsolved problem with the campus wifi that's starting to nag at me- I go to the campus grocery store for snacks, Pocari Sweat, and a couple beers, then visit the library. It's gigantic and difficult to navigate because half of the staircases and corridors are taped off for remodeling. The Macau Corner, which I've been looking forward to investigating, is at a brief glance a series of locked cabinets full of archival material and not the casual collection of Macau-oriented books I was hoping for. I'll have to go back and check it out more thoroughly, especially once I have the library computer info written down: if this wifi problem persists, I'll have to post to my website from there. Good thing I brought a thumb drive.
At this point I'm tempted to leave campus and go walk around Taipa or the Macau Peninsula, but long hours of travel and the heat conspire to keep me close to the dorms. I can't help but notice that every single water fountain I've come across is out of service for "hygiene reasons", which doesn't bode well. I've been drinking water from the attached hot tap, which I hope circumvents the mysterious hygiene problem. The vending machine downstairs doesn't just refuse to take bills, but does its best to savagely mangle them. Signs tell me that the AC shouldn't be left on when you're not around (fair enough, except that the whole dorm is a sauna) and that the ideal temperature is 25 degrees Celsius (untrue when you've been out in 31-degree sun and humidity all day). I'm trying to avoid letting little things like these get the best of me, but I've got three weeks to go.
Next up: first day of class, canteen food, and who knows what else. Até logo, amigos.
7.14.15
Canteen food is, of course, exactly what you'd expect. I skipped breakfast yesterday, but intended to get some this morning- until I saw the line. I think every one of the almost 300 students in the Portuguese program was there, and then some. The line is so long because there's a half-hour window open between the opening of the canteen and when classes begin, which is some bad timing. I turned around and went to Pacific Coffee, since a cup of joe sounded mighty good. It was closed, which was as baffling as it was frustrating. I guess it's because it's summer, but that excuse is getting old. Anyway, the professors are aware of the situation, and being a few minutes seems doable.
I met my roommate, Darren. He's 26, from Hong Kong, and quite affable. His English isn't great, but then again neither is my Mandarin, which is the language in which he usually addresses me. I'm not sure how, but he seems to know a number of the young ladies in our hall, all of whom are very nice, and today he introduced me to another Hong Konger, Kevin. (Or maybe Kelvin. I need to check.) Kevin's 22 and quite serious about HK maintaining its identity in the face of growing Mainland efforts to rub it out. He participated in the Umbrella Revolution last year. He's an interesting dude.
I was in Professor Cavalheiro's class for about five minutes before he sent me upstairs to the intermediate class. I was in there for even less time, and finally wound up back downstairs in the advanced class with Professor Leonor Seabra. The class material is decent, from what I've seen, and Professor Seabra doesn't waste any time speaking anything but Portuguese. Alas, she does so in a rather quiet voice, which makes her hard to follow. My classmates- as of today there are sixteen of them, I believe- are mostly women and all Chinese; well, I say that, but I think some may be from Hong Kong, and there's at least one Macanese woman. (N.B. I'm using "Macanese" in this instance to mean "someone from Macau", and not in the more strict sense of "someone of mixed Luso-Asian descent native to Macau".) Their Portuguese seems pretty good, and their accents lead me to believe that their teachers back home learned Continental Portuguese rather than the Brazilian variety. The unmistakeable unease of being in a formal language class hangs over the room, and isn't improved by conversation not being the main focus. It's a big change for me, since my year of classes at the Brazilian Arts Foundation has been primarily conversation-based, and everyone there is usually keen to talk. Now talking is something you're called upon to do, and it's usually reading aloud rather than conversing. On the plus side, I'll be doing a lot of writing in Portuguese, which I've never done before. I just hope I get corrections back.
After class I eat lunch- decent, if greasy, but goddamn the soup tastes like dishwater- and relax a bit in the dorm before getting on the bus to Macau proper. Since the new UM campus is actually on an island belonging to the Mainland, there's one way in and out, and only a few bus routes. Most of them drop you off at Praça Ferreira Amaral, a stone's through from Casino Lisboa and a stop along the routes of a zillion other buses. I wander around a bit, take some photos, do some homework over a Sagres at Cafe Ou Mun, and visit the Livraria Portuguesa, where I pick up a book of prose poems called Macau: O Livros dos Nomes by Carlos Morais José. I stop at the Cathedral Cafe on the way back to the bus stop, this time for a Super Bock, and then it's back to campus so I can make the Abertura do Curso de Verão, or Opening Ceremony of the Summer Course, at 6:00.
I wasn't expecting much, and in a way I got exactly that: there are no seats, which means the handful of speeches we get to hear are that much harder to bear. Luckily the speeches are short and not terrible: Professores Nunes and Moutinho say a bit, then a pretty jovial adminstration figure, then another one of those, and finally the Consul-Geral de Portugal em Macau e Hong Kong, who I recognized when I entered the room, having seen his photo in Portuguese-language Macau media before. I brought a blazer and tie with me to Macau, but had no idea this event would be, well, an event, so I end up standing around only slightly better dressed than a lot of my classmates but nowhere as nice as some (all of them ladies) or the teaching staff. Nobody cares but me.
Delicious Macanese food is served, and the Chinese penchant for ignoring the fuck out a proper queue manifests immediately. I chat with Professor Cavalheiro a bit, complimenting him on his beard (it's a great beard) and remarking that it reminds me of Camilo Pessanha's. We talk about Pessanha a bit, and when I ask if the Professor knows where Pessanha is buried, he says he does, and will be glad to show me. I'm pretty stoked about that outing.
As I'm standing around shoving minchi into my craw I'm approached by a young Portuguese woman I made for a journalist early on in the ceremony. I was right: she works for the Jornal Tribuna de Macau, which I believe is Macau's oldest surviving Portuguese paper. I soon find myself talking on the record about why I'm here, why I like Macau and the Portuguese language, and so on- all of this in Portuguese, mind you, because why wouldn't it be? The print edition of the JTM hit newsstands at 3:00 this afternoon, so I'm going back into town later to find a copy and see if I show up in the article about the summer program.
When I'm approached by some of my classmates later, who seem less shy outside of the sala de aulas, I also try to stick to Portuguese in the hope of getting them to do the same, which they generally do. It's hard to fault them, since I know how hard it is to try and use a language that isn't your own when you're in a new place, surrounded by strangers. We've got the rest of July for them to open up, and I hope they do, because speaking Portuguese is pretty great.
P.S. The Jornal Tribuna article is already online! I come off pretty well, though Senhora Almeida made my Portuguese sound better than it was.
5:45 AM. Can't sleep; woke up around four-something. I'm in a common room down the hall from my room, which means I'm without air conditioning. This is going to be a regular occurrence, and I wonder how much more quickly I and these brand-new buildings are going to fall apart due to constant exposure to humidity. Whether or not that's a factor, you can already see things crumbling at the edges: that's what happens when a place this big is built so quickly.
The University of Macau's new campus houses 10,000 students; I'd wager it's big enough for three times that. Who knows if they'll ever reach that level of enrollment. The outsized buildings, the empty paths and streets (yes, it's summer, but I don't see this place ever feeling crowded, which is a first for China), the sluggish waterways and propped-up trees all lend to the feeling of hasty realization of grandiose plans. It's easy to mock the newborn ugliness of the place, but not really worth it. After all, better that all that casino money be spent on education instead of reclaiming more land to build more casinos, right?
That's how I see it, and being a short-term foreign student I'm in no position to divine the intentions of the Macau SAR and the University administration. All I can do is speculate wildly- or more likely halfheartedly, since it's too hot to do anything wildly- and pay attention to what I came here for: the 29th Annual Portuguese Language and Culture Summer Course.
My correspondence with Ana Nunes and Ricardo Moutinho, the coordinators of the XXIX Curso de Verão de Língua e Cultura Portuguesa, in the months leading up to my arrival in Macau was always informative and affable, despite a certain degree of bureaucratic feet-dragging leading up to the official announcement of the course. When I get to campus, drop my things off in my room (where my roommate's things are proof that he exists, though he isn't present), and head over to the Faculdade de Humanidades building, I'm pleased to discover that Professores Nunes and Moutinho are just as pleasant in person. I learn that I'm one of at least a couple hundred students, most of them mainland Chinese and one of whom I met on the bus to campus when he was short a couple patacas for bus fare and all I had was a coin more than twice the cost of mine (fares must be paid in exact change; a pain in the ass, which is why I got a Macau Pass ASAP). I'm ashamed to say that I can't recall his name right now, but he was pretty friendly, and his Portuguese was pretty good.
Waiting in line to get my student ID and meal tickets (free food is a real boon, but let's hope canteen food here is better than it was during my last foray into the world of overseas language programs four years ago), I can't put my finger on how well most of these kids know Portuguese, because they're all understandably speaking Mandarin to one another and often resort to English when talking to the coordinators. The lists in the hallway indicate that the advanced class is only fourteen people, while the intermediate, basic, and introductory classes all have over twice that number of students. I'm enrolled in the basic course with Professor Jorge Cavalheiro, whose beard, glasses, and demeanor- I pass him on his bike an hour later- is hard evidence of there being a universal archetype of college professors. I talk to him briefly about possibly changing classes, since I'm unsure whether I'm better suited to the intermediate level, and he says we'll sort it out tomorrow, once he gets a feel for the overall proficiency level of the class.
With logistics more or less taken care of- less, really, since there's a heretofore unsolved problem with the campus wifi that's starting to nag at me- I go to the campus grocery store for snacks, Pocari Sweat, and a couple beers, then visit the library. It's gigantic and difficult to navigate because half of the staircases and corridors are taped off for remodeling. The Macau Corner, which I've been looking forward to investigating, is at a brief glance a series of locked cabinets full of archival material and not the casual collection of Macau-oriented books I was hoping for. I'll have to go back and check it out more thoroughly, especially once I have the library computer info written down: if this wifi problem persists, I'll have to post to my website from there. Good thing I brought a thumb drive.
At this point I'm tempted to leave campus and go walk around Taipa or the Macau Peninsula, but long hours of travel and the heat conspire to keep me close to the dorms. I can't help but notice that every single water fountain I've come across is out of service for "hygiene reasons", which doesn't bode well. I've been drinking water from the attached hot tap, which I hope circumvents the mysterious hygiene problem. The vending machine downstairs doesn't just refuse to take bills, but does its best to savagely mangle them. Signs tell me that the AC shouldn't be left on when you're not around (fair enough, except that the whole dorm is a sauna) and that the ideal temperature is 25 degrees Celsius (untrue when you've been out in 31-degree sun and humidity all day). I'm trying to avoid letting little things like these get the best of me, but I've got three weeks to go.
Next up: first day of class, canteen food, and who knows what else. Até logo, amigos.
7.14.15
Canteen food is, of course, exactly what you'd expect. I skipped breakfast yesterday, but intended to get some this morning- until I saw the line. I think every one of the almost 300 students in the Portuguese program was there, and then some. The line is so long because there's a half-hour window open between the opening of the canteen and when classes begin, which is some bad timing. I turned around and went to Pacific Coffee, since a cup of joe sounded mighty good. It was closed, which was as baffling as it was frustrating. I guess it's because it's summer, but that excuse is getting old. Anyway, the professors are aware of the situation, and being a few minutes seems doable.
I met my roommate, Darren. He's 26, from Hong Kong, and quite affable. His English isn't great, but then again neither is my Mandarin, which is the language in which he usually addresses me. I'm not sure how, but he seems to know a number of the young ladies in our hall, all of whom are very nice, and today he introduced me to another Hong Konger, Kevin. (Or maybe Kelvin. I need to check.) Kevin's 22 and quite serious about HK maintaining its identity in the face of growing Mainland efforts to rub it out. He participated in the Umbrella Revolution last year. He's an interesting dude.
I was in Professor Cavalheiro's class for about five minutes before he sent me upstairs to the intermediate class. I was in there for even less time, and finally wound up back downstairs in the advanced class with Professor Leonor Seabra. The class material is decent, from what I've seen, and Professor Seabra doesn't waste any time speaking anything but Portuguese. Alas, she does so in a rather quiet voice, which makes her hard to follow. My classmates- as of today there are sixteen of them, I believe- are mostly women and all Chinese; well, I say that, but I think some may be from Hong Kong, and there's at least one Macanese woman. (N.B. I'm using "Macanese" in this instance to mean "someone from Macau", and not in the more strict sense of "someone of mixed Luso-Asian descent native to Macau".) Their Portuguese seems pretty good, and their accents lead me to believe that their teachers back home learned Continental Portuguese rather than the Brazilian variety. The unmistakeable unease of being in a formal language class hangs over the room, and isn't improved by conversation not being the main focus. It's a big change for me, since my year of classes at the Brazilian Arts Foundation has been primarily conversation-based, and everyone there is usually keen to talk. Now talking is something you're called upon to do, and it's usually reading aloud rather than conversing. On the plus side, I'll be doing a lot of writing in Portuguese, which I've never done before. I just hope I get corrections back.
After class I eat lunch- decent, if greasy, but goddamn the soup tastes like dishwater- and relax a bit in the dorm before getting on the bus to Macau proper. Since the new UM campus is actually on an island belonging to the Mainland, there's one way in and out, and only a few bus routes. Most of them drop you off at Praça Ferreira Amaral, a stone's through from Casino Lisboa and a stop along the routes of a zillion other buses. I wander around a bit, take some photos, do some homework over a Sagres at Cafe Ou Mun, and visit the Livraria Portuguesa, where I pick up a book of prose poems called Macau: O Livros dos Nomes by Carlos Morais José. I stop at the Cathedral Cafe on the way back to the bus stop, this time for a Super Bock, and then it's back to campus so I can make the Abertura do Curso de Verão, or Opening Ceremony of the Summer Course, at 6:00.
I wasn't expecting much, and in a way I got exactly that: there are no seats, which means the handful of speeches we get to hear are that much harder to bear. Luckily the speeches are short and not terrible: Professores Nunes and Moutinho say a bit, then a pretty jovial adminstration figure, then another one of those, and finally the Consul-Geral de Portugal em Macau e Hong Kong, who I recognized when I entered the room, having seen his photo in Portuguese-language Macau media before. I brought a blazer and tie with me to Macau, but had no idea this event would be, well, an event, so I end up standing around only slightly better dressed than a lot of my classmates but nowhere as nice as some (all of them ladies) or the teaching staff. Nobody cares but me.
Delicious Macanese food is served, and the Chinese penchant for ignoring the fuck out a proper queue manifests immediately. I chat with Professor Cavalheiro a bit, complimenting him on his beard (it's a great beard) and remarking that it reminds me of Camilo Pessanha's. We talk about Pessanha a bit, and when I ask if the Professor knows where Pessanha is buried, he says he does, and will be glad to show me. I'm pretty stoked about that outing.
As I'm standing around shoving minchi into my craw I'm approached by a young Portuguese woman I made for a journalist early on in the ceremony. I was right: she works for the Jornal Tribuna de Macau, which I believe is Macau's oldest surviving Portuguese paper. I soon find myself talking on the record about why I'm here, why I like Macau and the Portuguese language, and so on- all of this in Portuguese, mind you, because why wouldn't it be? The print edition of the JTM hit newsstands at 3:00 this afternoon, so I'm going back into town later to find a copy and see if I show up in the article about the summer program.
When I'm approached by some of my classmates later, who seem less shy outside of the sala de aulas, I also try to stick to Portuguese in the hope of getting them to do the same, which they generally do. It's hard to fault them, since I know how hard it is to try and use a language that isn't your own when you're in a new place, surrounded by strangers. We've got the rest of July for them to open up, and I hope they do, because speaking Portuguese is pretty great.
P.S. The Jornal Tribuna article is already online! I come off pretty well, though Senhora Almeida made my Portuguese sound better than it was.
Wednesday, July 08, 2015
XXIX Curso de Verão de Língua e Cultura Portuguesa
It somehow escaped my notice until fairly recently that the Universidade de Macau, sometimes in conjunction with other institutions that support continued Lusitanian influence and culture in Macau and the rest of east Asia, has offered an intensive summer course in Portuguese for almost thirty years. I had the good fortune to learn of the existence of this year's Curso de Verão in time to apply, and not long thereafter I was accepted, so I can inform y'all that I will be leaving for Macau shortly. I'll be there, along with a good number of other students- most of them mainland Chinese- for three weeks of classes, so not only will my Portuguese improve, but I'll get to practice Mandarin and Cantonese as well.
As you might know, Macau is the reason I started learning Portuguese in the first place. While The Peregrinations of Anacleto Stornello is set about thirty years before the Portuguese managed to talk to the Chinese into giving them a tiny peninsula upon which to dwell between trading fairs at Canton/廣州, since the Portuguese presence in Asia plays a major part in the book I ended up learning a lot about A Cidade de Nome De Deus em China anyway- enough for me to regret not making more of my first visit there, and enough for my second visit to be sufficiently reverent but all too short. This time I should be able to make at least cursory tours of all the places I wanted to see before, as well as revisit spots that didn't get ample attention last year.
When I started learning Portuguese, I began by dredging up the remains of my knowledge of Spanish in order to read Camilo Pessanha (whose grave I hope to find this time around), progressed to buying books at the Livraria Portuguesa in Macau, moved on to taking Portuguese classes with the fine folks at the Brazilian Arts Foundation here in town, and ultimately went to Lisbon earlier this year with my wife. We had a fantastic time, and I had the honor of meeting the man behind Macau Antigo, João Botas, who not only took the time to meet me but showed me around the headquarters of Rádio e Televisão de Portugal. Everyone I've met and everything I've read along the way has encouraged me to keep learning, and I've found something indescribably wonderful in the language itself that all but guarantees my continued study thereof. I'm confident that my time at the Universidade de Macau will only buttress my love of the language of Camões, even if the future of Portuguese in Macau remains uncertain. I hope my attendance will help sustain that particular element of Macanese culture in its own small way.
In the coming weeks I intend to keep you, caro leitor, informed of my progress and give you my thoughts on modern Macau, the university, my classmates, and everything else. I'll be writing in English and Portuguese, and maybe some Chinese as well; anything without Chinese text will also be posted to my website, though I can't guarantee that the Portuguese text won't be corrupted by SDF's ongoing problem with diacritic marks. Thanks for reading, thanks to the Department of Portuguese at the Universidade de Macau for accepting me into the program, and, more than anything, thanks to my wonderful wife for knowing how much this opportunity means to me and fully supporting my attendance.
Até logo, amigos. Até Macau.
D.A.S.
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