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.
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