Ersatz Venice

The Venetian casino - 'Disney' Venice

My parents recently visited us on their way back from Australia to the UK. It seemed like a good way to ease them back into winter from summer, although from what I've heard, it doesn't seem to have been a very warm summer anyway, back in Melbourne.
Dad has a fascination with islands and other isolated outposts of humanity, so he was very keen to visit Macau, the other Special Administrative Region of China apart from Hong Kong. Keen observers will know that Macau is no island, but a peninsula attached to China, some 60 kilometres from HK. Interestingly, it was once an island, but a sandbar that connected to the mainland gradually built up until it became a peninsula, and now humans have helped this along with a land reclamation project.
I was curious about Macau too, but mostly because I'd heard it was an intriguing blend of Europe and Asia, with many remnants of Portuguese occupation amid what is an Asian city. The pace of development in Hong Kong is so fast and furious that very little survives for very long - at times it seems that only the temples in this city have survived the developers.
I'll get onto the real Macau soon, but I couldn't resist the temptation to drag everyone to what I'd heard was one of the Seven Kitsch Wonders of the World - the replication of Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal, in the Venetian casino. I'd read about it and heard about it, but like any good skeptic, I couldn't quite believe it until I had seen it with my own eyes, and having finally realised my dream of visiting the real Venice a couple of years ago, I had something to compare it to.
So we joined the crowd of Mainland tourists and made our way to the Casino, grabbing a handy taxi to cross one of the three amazing bridges that connect the main part of Macau to the island of Taipa, three kilometres to the south (now if only they installed some coloured lighting on these, like they would in Hong Kong, the effect would be perfect). As we walked in, via the West entrance, I couldn't see anything to distinguish this from any other bland but gaudy casino building. Not that I've been in a lot of casinos, but between movies and other media images of casino life, I have a sense of what passes for normal in these places. There were signs to the Grand Canal, so putting my disappointment aside, we followed these. Dad, as a retired water engineer, was somewhat disturbed, when he realised that the whole fake Venice complex was situated upstairs, above the main Casino level! Were there really canals, he was thinking, and why on earth would you attempt to engineer them in such an unlikely location? Nonetheless, they were indeed upstairs, and as we emerged into 'St Mark's Square' we were greeted by the sound of Italian opera, as sung by a small troupe of opera singers. Though the singers were Cantonese, they had clearly been trained in Western, rather than Cantonese opera forms. This was quite magnificent, if a little bizarre. The acoustics could have been better, but then this was essentially a very glamorous shopping mall, not an opera house.
Fake Venice was, I have to admit, all my kitsch heart had hoped for. There were gondoliers (a few whitefellas, but mostly Cantonese men and women, and interestingly, more female gondoliers than in the whole of Venice, Italy), three canals, and plenty of fake Italian architecture, as you can see in the picture above. Sadly, the photo does not do justice to the sky, because in Ersatz Venice, it is always sunset, with the evening light putting the first touches of colour on a few clouds studding an otherwise blue sky (complete with not-entirely-subtle ventilation system). Though none of the canals are really long enough to make it worth getting a gondola from anywhere to anywhere else, the price is certainly much more reasonable than in Venice itself, where you practically have to remortgage your house to afford the fare.
A more striking contrast with Venice itself is the absurd cleanliness of the place, which lent it a very Disney feel. The water itself was the pristine chlorinated blue of all the best swimming pools, unlike the canals of Venice, which can look like a hazard to marine life. It was perversely reassuring to see one piece of litter floating in one of the canals, perhaps an artistic homage to its namesake?!? I have to admit that I wouldn't actually recommend anyone visit the Venetian. Despite my love of kitsch, I had to admit is was essentially a shopping mall with a funky theme. I think they missed a great opportunity by not including the actual hotel rooms in the place as part of the faux Italian facades. It would have been much more alive, and a little less Disney, with some actual people inhabiting some of the hundreds of windows and balconies above street level. Did the designers think that nobody lives in any of the houses in the real Venice?
However, if you are in the neighbourhood, the outside of the Venetian is certainly worth going past, where there is a replica of the Campanile, the buildings look a little less 'plastic', and the water not quite so 'swimming-pool blue'.
You'd be much better to spend your time exploring Macau itself, which despite the overwhelming number of casinos (thirty or more, I believe), is a flourishing little city. Here you will see all sorts of marvellous sights, from a lion dance that we tracked down, after hearing the drumming at a distance, or a shop that seemed to sell only coconuts, though admittedly some were marked with lucky characters, allowing them to be sold, presumably at a considerable mark-up, to wedding organisers. I imagine we will be seeing a lot more lion/dragon/unicorn dances in our time here in Hong Kong, though I have to say I still haven't got the differences between them sorted out. I think this is a lion dance, because it only has two performers in the costume, rather than many, which would make it a dragon. And though the unicorn looks nothing like a 'Western' unicorn, I think that is recognisable by the forward curving horn on its head. This particular lion, as you can see, had a problem with a snake, and eventually danced the story through to where it was worrying at the snake like any self-respecting cat might worry at a lizard or mouse.
The Portuguese heritage of the place was still very much in evidence, with most of the signs being bilingual Portuguese/Cantonese. Given many of the similarities between written Portuguese and Spanish, it was an unexpected lesson in Spanish vocabulary, as the similar Portuguese word would usually trigger my memory of the word in Spanish. The narrow cobbled streets and curious back alleys were also very reminiscent of a visit we made to Spain back in 2009. Wandering around this area was an odd sensation, blending memories of that holiday with overlays of classic older Chinese housing that we know from the few parts of Hong Kong where these survive. We definitely plan to return, and explore a bit further.

You could also make time to see the incredible A-ma temple, reputedly built in 1488, and perched on the side of a very rocky hill. Apparently it was one of the first places ever photographed in China, presumably sometime back in the nineteenth century. This is dedicated to the goddess Matsu, who is apparently the same goddess of the sea who is called Tin Hau in Hong Kong, and has many temples dedicated to her here. This is hardly surprising, given the dominance of fishing as a trade in the history of both places.
The photo does not do it justice, with its many paths winding up the hill, past various shrines and temple buildings, to the summit where there are enormous characters carved into the rock. One of which I remember was 天 (sky or heaven) which may mean that the other character was 后, which would mean 'Heavenly Queen' (Tin Hau). However my memory for Cantonese characters is notoriously poor - they seem to slide out of my memory almost as fast as I learn them.
If you look between the bamboo in the picture you can just make out two tall thin yellowish columns. They were two of the largest sticks of incense I have ever seen, each of them about 25-30 cm in diameter. They could have been used as columns to hold up a ceiling, but instead they were slowly smouldering away - I can only imagine how long they burn for. Days? Weeks?
I am still trying to get a sense of how to be respectful around the many temples that I see or visit during my time here. In some ways they are very laid back, with various people sitting around smoking and shooting the breeze, or people coming in to quickly light some incense, before getting on with the rest of their day. Then of course there are tourists like myself, having a look around, but not really sure what the rules might be in a place like this. Cantonese locals suggest to me that I shouldn't light incense at a temple myself, unlike lighting a candle in a Catholic cathedral. To do so is to acknowledge a relationship with that particular goddess or god, and perhaps even that particular temple, and creates an obligation on a person to return to that same temple before the end of the year, as some sort of act of closure or thanksgiving. It is all a reminder of how ignorant I am beyond the basic facts of the major world religions.
Perhaps I can remedy some of that ignorance, at least in terms of Taoism and Buddhism as I get to know Hong Kong better.