zimatravels

     “Very lucky.  I can see that next month you’ll be very lucky,” he said as he came into my vision.  I had been walking deep in thought and wasn’t prepared for this turbaned good-looking young man with a magnificent curled moustache.  After all, I was in Macau where Chinese make up 95% of the population.  This member of the 5% “others” category kept muttering about my good luck and pointing to a piece of red showing out from his turban.  If this was supposed to have any significance to me, I disappointed him.

     Slowly, I grasped the thought that he wanted to tell my fortune.  Perhaps that’s what he wanted, but he was already walking on.  I called after him, “Oh no, I don’t want to know my future.”  And so I don’t, and haven’t ever really wanted any fortuneteller — no matter in which country — to tell me my future.  After all, curiosity is a major force that drives me and keeps me interested in living.

     My curiosity has led me to my room and hallway in Taipa Village in a country where I celebrate Moon Festival.  It has led me to places where I am always a part of that small “other” category of residents, where an Indian man can appear before me as well as an international mixture of kids at the Canadian College of Macau where I teach.

     Here I share my room with one tiny mouse and lots of geckoes who (thankfully) like the supply of mosquitoes that invade my room.  I light my camping stove with joss sticks and live near several Buddhist, rather than Jewish, temples.  The mob scene of Macau is a sharp contrast to little Taipa Village and even more of a contrast to wonderful Coloane, which offers rolling hills to climb as well as ocean swimming in a picturesque cove, or in a delightful pool I recently discovered across from the cove.

     I have no interest in getting a television, but I’m kept well informed and entertained by BBC on my small short-wave radio.  Now that I’m so close to Hong Kong, BBC reception is clear and easy.  I don’t have to hold my radio and keep moving it around to pick up the signal as I do in China.  There is so much more on BBC than the news.  I’m surprised at the breadth and depth of their programs compared to Voice of America, which offers some entertainment and a lot of American propaganda.

     I have many choices for food here.  I can eat bagels, lox, and cream cheese, pizza from Pizza Hut, European espresso coffee, great chocolate, or any kind of Chinese or Portuguese food.  I know I’m in Macau when someone orders a lemon tea or lemon Coke, takes a spoon and thoroughly and methodically mashes the many lemon slices to a pulp before drinking.  There’s wonderful imported juice in the supermarkets.  I miss juice so much when I’m in China!  Even some of the five-star hotels in China pass off Tang as orange juice.  When I told someone in China I missed juice very much, he asked what juice was.  When I explained that the juice was squeezed from the fruit, “What a waste of precious fruit,” was his reply.  As I thought about it, he was right.  I remember ordering a glass of juice at juice stands in Israel and noticing how much fruit it took to make a glass to drink.  Still, I’m so glad to have juice back in my life.

     For a bit more than I pay for my room monthly, I have joined the Hyatt Hotel’s fitness center.  Here I work out as many times as I wish each week in the exercise classes run by gorgeous, musular Australian young men.  Afterward, I pamper myself with the sauna, steam room, and jacuzzi.  And as often as I feel I can afford the $25, I have a massage by a masterful Filipina masseuse.

     Standing alongside the human-sized statues of Coke and Hi C, the trees in Taipa are quite magnificent.  Some are two trunks intertwined.  Massive banyan trees wrap themselves into creative designs.  An old temple down the street is slowly falling apart.  It has lost its ceiling, but a tree and its roots actually form the roof.  I don’t understand how it is even possible, but I can look up and see its root structure with my own eyes.

     My home was most likely built by a Portuguese merchant who needed to be near the sea where the ships, loaded with tea and silk, anchored a hundred years ago.  The sea has been banished from those shores in a land reclamation effort, but a quiet, lovely park remains, along with a couple of old, restored homes and a museum to remember the glory of Taipa’s past.  I walk there often.

     If Macau is most like a modern city, and Taipa is a quaint suburb, then Coloane is the picturesque countryside that offers trails along the hilltops overlooking the Pearl River and the South China Sea beyond.  From here it is hard to tell that Macau is booming and pounding.  Here the birds sound louder than the explosions, grinding of steel, and violent sounds of rearranging the earth.  The trail I like the most goes from the sea on one side, through some hilltops, and down to another beach enclosed by hills.

     The sand on the beach I love to visit is scratchy and feels like a foot massage on my feet.  How many voices the water has!  Little brooks babble, streams gurgle, rivers rush, and the ocean speaks many sounds.  The water can be serene and restful in its monotony, or it can be full of swishes and swirls as it curls noisily around the big rocks.  It can leap playfully upon rocks as well as the unwary people walking on the rocks.  And, it makes an audible shoosh as it crawls over the sand.

     In Macau, I can find pices of Hong Kong, China, Portugal, Britain, the United States, Santa Barbara by the sea, and a unique blend of all of them.  I can live in an old Chinese village, work for a Canadian school, get a massage at a five-star hotel, and see an American doctor connected to a Baptist Clinic at $10 an office visit.  I am living in a time warp, and a place warp.

This is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.  I lived in Macau from late 1992 to early 1995.

Tags: Macau city; Taipa village, Macau; Coloane, Macau; eating in Macau; cultures of Macau; life in Maca, Travel

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