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.
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