Greetings from Guangzhou

I'm sitting in my outrageous room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, in a bathrobe, CNN morning (or, rather, evening) news droning on in the background, dawn still yet to break over the Guangzhou.  For 36 hours, I've turned into a jetsetting business man (only to turn back into the pumpkin I really am this evening, when I have to fly back to Shanghai in time to teach my class tomorrow morning).  This little excursion to Guangzhou has brought back certain memories of being a paralegal -- here I am, in a new city, and will have spent the vast majority of my time here in hotel conference rooms (there's nothing inherently wrong with that - they're really nice conference rooms).  Before descending downstairs to the zoo that will be J.D. Power's Annual Client Seminar, figured I'd record a few memories of this bizarre business jaunt:

• Unlike some of its American counterparts, which tend to trade off the famous brand rather than provide actual luxury service, the Ritz Carlton Guangzhou is pretty exquisite.  My room is enormous, the bathroom is almost as big, and there are more staff milling about making sure I'm perfectly happy than I think I've ever seen at a hotel.
• I spent most of yesterday afternoon assisting the marketing team with the sorting of over 200 client names, 90% of which were written in Chinese.  It came as an impressive surprise to everyone, including and especially myself, that I was able to recognize most of the characters and actually be of some help.
• My new favorite Chinese character is 彧 (pronounced yu, 4th "falling" tone).  First, in means "of high literary talent", which of course is very descriptive of yours truly.  But even better: my Chinese colleagues couldn't even recognize it yesterday while sorting through the names.  I got a disturbing amount of pleasure from whipping out my cell phone dictionary and looking it up for them.
• 36 hours (and the few days leading up to the trip) in close quarters with my colleagues are more than enough to bring out some of the nasty and scandalous office politics that exist, in any office, I'm sure, but most certainly here at JDPA.
• Guangzhou seems like the new Shanghai.  Everything is under construction, and you get the feeling that before long, this will be another 20+ million people megaplex, particularly considering the close proximity to Hong Kong and Macau.

Time for me to scarf down some breakfast before watching what is sure to be poetry in motion, as the hordes descend on our meeting.  I'll leave you with the few shots of the Guangzhou Tower and skyline that I managed in the 30 minutes or so that I have spent outside since arriving here.

Burger Blog Post #2: Piro

Your favorite burger foreign correspondent submitted his second contribution to the NYC Burger Weekly blog this week.  My post is below (albeit without any action shots of me eating a burger, which received some positive feedback from the peanut gallery).  Check out the blog if you're ever hunting for a good burger in New York - they've covered some serious ground.

http://www.burgerweekly.com/

Burger Ordered: Cheeseburger, with caramelized onions, tomatoes, lettuce, special “burger sauce.”

The Experience:  Inspired by his experience at New York Style Steak & Burger a few weeks ago, Burgermeister Josh embarked on his second career mission for Burger Weekly.  A few burger slinging establishments near Josh’s office offer Monday evening happy hour specials, so he decided to take the ten minute walk down to Piro in the French Concession, where a free pint of Stella Artois awaited all burger seeking patrons.  Piro marked Josh’s second consecutive burger joint that advertised a top burger award – this one from Time Out Shanghai magazine.

Despite its somewhat eclectic name, Piro is your basic sports bar.  There are college banners prominently hung up, greeting you as you enter.  The fact that the bar purports to be both a University of Wisconsin bar and a Penn State (two Big Ten rivals) provides a reminder that this is Shanghai, after all, and American sports subtleties are bound to be overlooked occasionally. A strange combination of top-40 pop and country music serenaded the burger-eaters at a comfortable volume – perfectly tolerable until, after only about 20 minutes, a repeat played (big time demerits).  The televisions featured Australian Open tennis action, a rare opportunity to watch live sports at a reasonable hour in Shanghai which Burgermeister Josh enjoyed.

The Taste: Burgermeister Josh poured over the 20-something burger options on Piro’s menu before ultimately deciding on the Cheeseburger – a compromise between the appeal of the caramelized onions that came with it, and his theory that in order to aptly gauge the quality of a burger, one should taste the classic, no-frills option.  When it arrived, Josh’s initial reaction was one of disdain.  The cheese, arguably the most important non-beef part of a cheeseburger, consisted two sad-looking Kraft singles.  Different colored Kraft singles, but Kraft singles all the same.  It’s difficult to make a burger look tasty when it looks so….processed.  Is investing in some real cheese too much to ask?

Presentation aside, the first few bites of the cheeseburger were quite satisfying indeed.  The meat was soft and juicy, well-cooked, and tasted like a good patty should taste like: ground beef, unadorned by over-attentive marinades or spices.  The caramelized onions provided a deliciously sweet and tangy counterpoint to the savory flavor of the meat (then again, how can you possibly screw up caramelized onions?  They’re God’s gift to burger accompaniments).

Unsurprisingly, however, the cheese added very little to the taste (Kraft singles tend to get overpowered by literally any other competing flavor).  The “special burger sauce” – nothing more than a light chipotle mayo – was also uninspiring, and provided little more than additional mess.  The mess was magnified halfway through the experience, when the entire burger fell apart.  Eating the second half of his burger with a fork, while perhaps just as tasty, was naturally slightly less satisfying for Burgermeister Josh.

The French fries that came with the burger were a definite bright spot: thick wedges, full of potato-y fluff, and salted well within the Goldilocks range (not too much, not too little).  The two Czech dudes sitting next to Josh, who opted for the mashed potato option, spent part of their meal gazing longingly at Josh’s fries after their mashed came out topped with some unidentifiable bean-based glop.

The Verdict:  Burgermeister Josh feels bad that he is being so hard on Shanghai’s burger scene.  But he’s a New Yorker at heart, and he can’t ignore his roots.  Piro’s cheeseburger, while above average based on what Josh has experienced thus far in Shanghai, is passable, but certainly not exceptional.  It is not difficult to make a ground beef patty with caramelized onions taste good.  Piro succeeded in that endeavor.  But the disaster that was the cheese, the calamity of the burger’s halftime collapse, and the ennui of the bun, burger sauce, and everything else other than the fries all add up to a solid “needs improvement” rating from this demanding New York City burger lover.  New York Style Steak & Burger defended its “best burger in Shanghai” rating more admirably than did Piro.

That's Some Catch, That Catch-22

During the movie "Blood Diamond," Leonardo DiCaprio explains that after a certain amount of time, you learn to accept certain aspects of living in Africa.  "T.I.A., bru" he says, in his somewhat dubious South African drawl.  "This Is Africa."  So it is with China.  There are just those times when the only possible explanation is to shake your head and say, with all due exasperation, "This is China."  Yesterday was one of those days.

It starts with some good news: I managed to finagle my way onto the envoy heading down to Guangzhou next week for a Client Seminar that we host every year.  What I'll be doing down there remains somewhat of a mystery, but it will certainly be more productive (at least for me, if not my company) than it would be to spend those two days  in the office.  So I get a free trip to one of the major cities in China to which I've never been.

Maybe I was spoiled by the two years I spent as a paralegal at a big law firm, but this is how I have come to expect business travel to work: either A) the employer makes travel arrangements on behalf of the employees, or B) employees book travel individually, and then submit receipts to be reimbursed in a timely fashion.  I've only had to submit an expense report at my current job once -- and it took two months to be paid -- so I was really hoping yesterday that we'd operate under Procedure A.  No dice.  "Just go ahead and book your flights, Josh, and submit the receipt for reimbursement," I was told.  Okay, not the end of the world, just standard Procedure B, right?

Remember, we're in China here.  The standard operating procedure is a sort of Murphy's Law 2.0 -- anything that can be made complicated, should be.  First, the ticket booking process: you wouldn't think it was possible for international flights to be simpler to purchase than domestic ones.  And yet, in China, it is.  See, if you're flying internationally, you can almost always pay with an international credit card.  But with domestic flights, the airlines are somehow incapable of processing foreign cards, unless you jump through several hoops (all of which are very small and hard to find).  After several failed attempts to book through Chinese travel sites, airline websites, and even one direct phone call to an airline booking office (which took the better part of yesterday morning), I finally managed to book my tickets through good old Orbitz.com.  To quote Basil Fawlty: "piece of cake.  Now comes the tricky bit."

Upon receiving my receipt and itinerary from Orbitz, I forwarded them to the appropriate human resources folks, along with the "official" expense claim documentation, as I was told to do.  An hour or so later, I received an email requesting that I forward the original hard copy of the invoice to the processing agency (which, naturally, is elsewhere in Shanghai, so had to be sent via express mail).  "But, see, this is an e-ticket," I tried to explain.  "There is no 'original' hard copy."  So I simply printed out the paperwork I got from Orbitz, and sent that along.  T&E done.

Not so fast.  Several emails, phone calls, and frustrated conversations later (making a very long story slightly less long), I still haven't found the proverbial cheese at the end of this byzantine reimbursement labyrinth.  Here's the basic problem: in order to satisfy tax requirements with the Chinese government (you didn't think we'd get through a "this is China" story without the government being involved, did you?), government endorsed invoices (发票, fapiao) are required.  These fapiao can only be issued by Chinese entities, so even though I'm flying on a China Southern, a Chinese airline, the original transaction came from Orbitz.  So no fapiao.  And since I don't have a Chinese credit card, it was nearly impossible for me to make the reservation with a Chinese, fapiao-issuing source.  What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a Catch-22:

It may take several lifetimes, but I'm still reasonably confident that I will eventually get back the 450 bucks I spent on those tickets to Guangzhou.  I have enough faith in my ability to yell at people.  But seriously...wouldn't it have been simpler to just buy the damn tickets on my behalf?  There are 25 million people in this city, many of whom have Chinese credit cards, several dozen of whom work in my office, and at least 5 of whom were aware of the issues at stake and still had me go buy my own plane tickets.  I guess sometimes you just gotta throw up your hands and say "this is China."

In other news, they've moved my desk in the office twice in the last three weeks.  Add that to the fact that I currently can't find my stapler....

 

The Veritable Horde

I'm told that the interstitial space between the calendar new year and the Chinese (lunar) New Year is often characterized by a lull of business productivity here.  The expression "we'll revisit this after Chinese New Year" is a common utterance; it's almost as if the country starts grinding to a dull rumble around Christmas, resting up during the holiday season and its January aftermath in preparation for the hoopla that ensues during the week (or three) of celebration during Spring Festival, as the Chinese New Year is called.

The optimist in me believes this may help to explain why I have had so relatively little to do at work recently (the pessimist -- the part of me many of you may be more familiar with -- realizes that it's more due to my ill-defined role at my company.  The rest of the office, after all, has been relatively abuzz with activity these past few weeks, oblivious to my virtually nonexistent workload.  But I digress).  The happy consequence of all of this is that I've had the time to dedicate to my new gig as the manager of The Horde, the best underground original folk band this side of the Yangtze River (what can I say, I'm a company man).  The band's producing our (I've started using the first person to describe the band) first album, so I spent the week negotiating with a CD producer in Shenzhen to get our album burned and printed.  With a little luck, we'll have copies delivered in a few weeks, in time for our album release party in early March.

The Horde family is a wide range of musicians, sound engineers, significant others, fans, and, of course, managers.  The harmonica player, George, organized a dinner last night at a Dongbei restaurant (sort of like Chinese comfort food) as a mini farewell party -- George and his girlfriend are leaving for a month to visit her family in Chile.  Between everyone in the Horde fold, and their various guests, the dinner turned into a thirteen person affair full of festive cheer.  "Better make a reservation ahead of time," Tom, the guitarist, wrote in an email a few days ago when George proposed the plan.  "We'll be a veritable horde at a dinner."

It's nice - sharing a meal with people from all corners of the world (almost literally: we had representatives from the US, Canada, England, China, Chile, and Scotland at dinner), with the common bond being their mutual support for this ragtag band.  Dinner flowed seamlessly -- but for a long cab ride through the concrete jungle of Shanghai, epitomizing the sheer size of the city -- into a gig at a Chinese bar.  In the middle of the gig, the somewhat inebriated Chinese patrons (who always seem to love  The Horde despite not being able to understand most of the lyrics) started Gangnam-Style dancing to the music, shouting "Gangnam Style!  Gangnam Style!" at song breaks.  The Horde does covers, but it'd be fairly difficult for a guitar, mandolin, seat drum, harmonica, and accordion to pull off the dulcet melody of the Korean mega hit.

A successful night for The Horde (1200 RMB into the band fund, which I'm now responsible for, thank you very much), capped off by the discovery of this sign on the door of the bathroom at the bar -- the single best sign I've seen thus far in China:

Apologies to the faint of heart.  Or the underage.  The Chinese just says "Prohibited bathroom behavior."

Breathing in Beijing, and Other Miscellany

A combination of shoddy internet at home, being busy, and writer's block (mostly writer's block) has resulted in a sharp drop off in blog posts.  Rather than force the issue, I've decided just to let the blog become whatever it naturally becomes -- which, for better or for worse, appears to be more of a weekly thing now than the every-other-day clip I was running at back when living here was full of "can you believe this shit" and "look at these funny Chinese people" moments.  To repeat a recurring theme of this blog: as life becomes increasingly normal here, the oddities seem increasingly less bizarre.  By the time I return to the US, I'll probably have to start a new blog about all the mind-boggling things Americans get up to in their daily lives.

As some of you may have read, the pollution in Beijing has reached absurd levels, apparently all of a sudden.    As reported here by the New York Times (and others), the device that records air quality in Beijing registered a score of 755 over the weekend.  This might not seem alarming, until you learn that the scale is from 0 to 500.  That's right.  Beijing's air quality is over 50% worse than worst possible score on the scale.  A few years ago, when the air score eclipsed 500 for the first time, an embassy official dubbed the air quality as "crazy bad" on Twitter.  I guess that makes it "ludicrously awful" now.  I was just texting with a friend of mine who's in Bejing now.  She said she's investing in gas masks.  I imagine living in Beijing right now must be a lot like this:

Over the past few weeks, I've been busily booking flights, trains, and hotels in preparation for my parents visit to the Far East in late March.  Absentmindedly glancing at the terms and conditions for train tickets from Shanghai to Beijing, I noticed this amazing tidbit, which most certainly falls into this "Only in China" category:

Limited Items:

Regulation on the amount of the followings that can be brought onto train:

1. Less than 5 gas lighters.
2. Less than 20 boxes of matches.
3. Items like enamel and hair dye, less than 20 ml.
4. Items like alcohol less than 100 ml.
5. Items like styling mouse, insecticide and air-refresher, less than 600 ml.
6. Less than 20 newborn poultries.

Nos. 1-5 seem perfectly fine, though why 4 lighters is acceptable and 6 lighters is illegal is beyond me.  Also, I would be willing to bet than many people pack more than 100 mL of alcohol on these trains (and if you include items like alcohol, then who knows).  But nothing really compares to number 6.  You really can't make this stuff up.  It's a bit disturbing to know that someone sat down and thought of what a reasonable number of baby chickens would be acceptable on a train from Shanghai to Beijing, and after mulling it over, decided that 5, 10, 15, 19 chickens would be fine, but let's not get carried away here, thereby setting the limit at 20 (does the number decrease or increase if the poultry is mature, rather than newborn??).  I've ridden Chinese trains before, several times, and have yet to see a chicken wandering about, but it's good I read these terms and conditions because in the event that I do see one, at least I'll know it and no fewer than 18 of its brethren are acceptable companions for any individual ticket holder.

In other news, I've picked up two new roles here in Shanghai since I last posted: manager, and teacher.  For a few months now, my roommate Franco's band, The Horde, has jokingly referred to me as their manager.  But a few weeks ago, they asked me to take on the role in a more official capacity, and I've done so with gusto.  We're busily planning the release of The Horde's first album, as well as various gigs over the course of the winter and spring.  Shanghai's underground music community is a very tight knit, friendly bunch -- the bands look out for each other, and help each other out.  Nobody is looking for money or fame; they're all just concerned with making music, sharing it with others, and having a good time.  It's been pretty fun to become part of that community here.

I've also accepted a gig as a part time teacher at a school/test-prep center, where I'll be teaching a writing class to high schoolers on Saturday mornings.  It'll mean temporarily working six days a week, and not having much weekend to speak of, but I'm looking forward to actually teaching a classroom for the first time.  I've got a lot of tutoring experience, and I've enjoyed that, but classroom teaching is a different beast.  I'm frequently told (and I think as well) that I'd make a very good teacher, so I'm looking forward to putting that to the test.

A Hidden Gem: Guyi Garden

Shanghai is not particularly well known for its physical beauty.  There's the Bund, which is most certainly striking (particularly at night), but to label that beauty "physical" would be a bit misleading, I think.  It's more just stunning, and impressive in its demonstration of China's burgeoning modernity.  It's tough to find a place in this city where it's less than readily apparent that you're in a city of 23 million people (like Central Park provides for New York, for example).  Which is why my excursion today to Guyi Garden (古漪园) in the town of Nanxiang (南翔) on the outskirts of Shanghai was so refreshing (despite having developed some sort of cough/cold/hopefully-not-flu bug overnight).

The garden is comprised of several acres of delicate ponds, still-green-in-winter grassy areas, and jagged, jarring rock formations.  The telltale sights and sounds of the construction that is still pervasive, even some 20 kilometers away from downtown Shanghai, are still present, providing ample point counterpoint opportunities for the contemplative photographer.  But it feels like an oasis, a taste of the old amidst a desert of new.

The garden was constructed in the early Ming Dynasty (16th Century) as an homage to the emperor at the time (very common).  It's been moved and rebuilt several times, but unlike the more-famous Yu Garden (豫园), it hasn't been overrun by the expat-targeting tourist trap shops, merchants, and overpriced food purveyors.  Instead, the tourist appeal at Guyi is distinctly Chinese - there were plenty of people here, but I failed to see a single fellow Westerner during my afternoon there.


                                         



                            

The garden attracts visitors as well for the restaurant that abuts it -- The Guyi Garden Restaurant, which  purports to have been the original source of the now-famous Shanghai xiaolongbao soup dumplings (小笼包).  The restaurant has been churning out the fluffy, fat-filled fancies since 1871, if the sign out front is to be believed.  A brief disclaimer -- like pizza and hamburgers in New York, the battle to be known as the progenitor of the xiaolongbao is not a cut and dry case.  Many places claim to have initiated the soup dumpling tradition, that is now not even solely associated with Shanghai, but rather for much of this east-central region of the country.  In fact, Guyi doesn't even refer to its wares as Shanghai xialongbao, but rather Nanxiang xiaolongbao.  I've seen similar turf declarations in Nanjing and Suzhou as well.

Regardless of who started making soup dumplings, I ordered a basic set of dumplings to see whether the quality mirrored the longevity.  Inexplicably, the smallest order of xiaolong had 25 pieces, so I must sheepishly admit that I was unable to finish (remember, I'm not feeling well, and these things don't exactly have the same recuperative powers of Mom's chicken soup, so give me a break).  The dumplings were quite tasty, and the vinegar and lajiang (辣酱, the red hot sauce), both shown below, were excellent.  Everything was far better than what you could get at a random street vendor, but perhaps not quite as delightful as some of the fancier, famous places downtown (e.g. Din Tai Fung, Crystal Jade, etc).  Then again, of course, those joints serve about 4-6 soup pouches for the same price that I paid for my 25.  So there.

Shanghai is not a famously beautiful city.  It is also not famous for its spectacular tourist attractions.  While it does have a fascinating history, most of that history is invisible now -- the city today is only about 30 years old, and was built on top of the various prior renderings of Shanghai.  It has a ton of things going for it, but these three things are probably not its strongest assets.  But in a city so massive, with just a little digging, you can find nuggets of both history and beauty, well within the city limits.  Less than two years ago, Nanxiang wasn't accessible by Metro.  Now it is.  As I made the trip up, which took far less time than it would take me to get from the Upper West Side to Coney Island, I noticed unfamiliar colors and shapes sprouting in unfamiliar directions on what had become an entirely familiar Metro map.  As the city expands, so too is the Metro -- four brand new lines are either set to open or have done so already.  Without any fanfare or hoopla, the Metro expanded, virtually overnight, presumably opening up easy access to far more hidden Nanxiangs.

P.S.  Two slightly unrelated pictures that require brief explanation.  The first is another example of a funny Chinese sign, in the same bizarre context (protecting the grass) that are all over the place here.  For some reason, nobody wants to write "Don't step on the grass" the way many other instructive signs do: "No smoking" or "No climbing" or "No spitting" (okay that last one was a joke, those signs clearly don't exist...they spit everywhere, on  everything, and, if you're not careful, everyone).

It's a bit hard to read, but this one says, "Green will benefit ones's health."

This last one isn't even from today - it's from a few nights ago at a new whiskey bar that opened up downtown.  What you're looking at is a glass of Glenfiddich 15 year single malt scotch, at a shockingly reasonable price for downtown Shanghai (or anywhere).  I quickly discovered why it was so cheap -- they don't give you very much scotch and instead filled the tumbler with an ice cube the size of Neptune.  Rookie mistake on my part, particularly considering you should never drink single malt with ice.

New Years in Macau

For the first time in years, I didn't have plans for New Years Eve.  As of 4PM on December 31, my only plan was to get some sushi and sake with Serge (one of the roomies), and we would see where the night took us from there.  A few days earlier, the realization that my first New Years in Shanghai would be essentially without a concrete plan of action was somewhat discouraging.  But by the day of, I had decided that the best way to enjoy New Years in Shanghai was to do exactly what Serge and I were going to do: have dinner, have a few drinks, and go hit the streets in search of unplanned fun.

That would change, very quickly indeed.

At dinner with Serge, the topic of conversation ranged, naturally for two fairly introspective people on New Years, from reminiscing about the past year to looking forward to the coming one.  At one point, we deviated from such deep discussion, and started discussing our long put-off plan to go to Macau.  He's been, many times, and has wanted to take me there pretty much since we've known each other.  It's only a 2.5 hour flight down from Shanghai, and you can get there relatively cheaply because there are three cities within easy striking distance (Hong Kong, across the bay, and Shenzhen and Zhuhai on the Chinese side of the border).  At one point, after a particularly rousing gulp of sake, one of us said to the other one, "You know...we could just go tonight."

By 7am on the next morning (January 1), we were on a plane.  To go through the sequence of ridiculous events that led from the Japanese restaurant in downtown Shanghai to a China Eastern flight bound for Zhuhai would be to do a disservice to the sheer absurdity and spontaneity of the decision to go.  Suffice it to say, it included not just one, but two trips to Hongqiao Airport in the span of five hours (the first one to demand that they let us on the next flight to Macau, Hong Kong, or Zhuhai, only to discover that the entire airport had shut down for the evening).

24 hours after landing in Zhuhai, we were back in Shanghai, home from a 36 hour extension of New Years that I will never forget (save for the parts I, well, can't remember).  Now, objectively speaking, taking a last minute trip to Macau was, for a number of reasons, not the wisest of choices.  Primarily, it was expensive, something that obviously didn't matter to us at the time.  We also didn't sleep much at all, which dampened the tourist spirit somewhat.  But that's all besides the point.  I am not a very spontaneous person.  I'm about as risk-averse as it comes (except, I suppose, when it comes to gambling, which I have been known to do on occasion.  Such as last night, for example.  Don't worry.  Everything in moderation).  So to have an experience such as a random jaunt to Macau was to prove to myself, to a certain extent, that I too can be spontaneous and do crazy things just for the sake of doing them.  That in and of itself was exciting enough to warrant the trip.

There are moments and experiences in life, both good and bad, that keep us on our toes, and that suggest to us that regardless of what happens, life always has the potential for surprising us.  The 36 hour span from the Japanese restaurant on Monday night to Pudong Airport arriving home on Wednesday afternoon certainly qualify as one of those periods.

If I have any regrets, it is that I did not capture enough of the trip with pictures.  The ones below are the ones I have, and will therefore have to do.

Certainly not the most flattering photo of either me or Serge, but it does justice to the absurdity of the situation: Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai, with dawn just settling in on New Years Day, and the realization that we were on our way to Macau similarly dawning on us.

I was expecting Macau to be a Vegas of the East -- glitz and glamour, lights and spectacle, with no real culture or history to speak of.  I was wrong.  Behind the facade formed by the many casinos along the waterfront is a network of winding narrow streets, and old Portuguese architecture.  Much of the city looks like a combination of Miami and New Orleans, and on streets like this one, you would never know that you were in a city that has recently outstripped Las Vegas in terms of gambling revenue.

Of course, if it's the neon wonderland of massive casino/hotel/entertainment megaplexes that you seek, Macau will satisfy these cravings as well.  In the foreground sits the Wynn, on the water, with the monstrous and (in my opinion) hideous Grand Lisboa in the background providing the only real skyline to speak of in Macau.

Macau Tower overlooking the two manmade lakes that separate Macau Peninsula from the South China Sea.

At night, the Grand Lisboa really gets going.  As if the structure wasn't ugly enough, it starts emulating an erupting volcano in lights.

In an obvious homage to Vegas water shows, particularly the one at the Bellagio, the Wynn hotel has an hourly water show in front of the casino.  It's not as impressive as the one in Vegas, though the flamethrowers do add a certain pizzazz.

We went on a late night pilgrimage to the ruins of the St. Paul's Cathedral, a 500 year old church that was almost entirely destroyed by a typhoon that hit Macau in 1835.  All that remains is the facade (there is just a garden, no church, behind what you can see in these pictures).

And one final look at the Lisboa, at the witching hour, which has turned from fiery reds and oranges to more of an aquatic theme, watching over a sleepy evening in Macau.