Macau. Yep. Went back there again.
Well, both of us made it to the bus station with about 5 minutes to spare. The ride took about 2 hours. When we finally got to Zhuhai, we had some breakfast at this foreign place. Yumi said, "I want something besides chinese food. If i want chinese, I can eat in Xiaolan." i was like, "Cool beans." I had the best baked spaghetti ever in China. Maybe its becausee they are so close to Macau they can get real cheese easily and the sauce was real good too.
After that, we headed into the lines for passport checks. I don't know why it was so busy and what was going on to cause it, but there were the longest lines I have seen at the Macau border. Never seen it this busy. We stood in line for about 30 minutes. Luckily, we had gotten in line behind the family with a 3 year old and a 6 month old and we were able to enjoy ourselves for most of the time. It was a cute family. A Chinese guy and a Swiss woman and two hybrid kids - an older boy and a younger girl. Their passports were Swiss and the Chinese guy spoke Guangdonghua, so I am guessing he married her and became a citizen so he could get out of China....for love....of course. The mother was wearing this blue level on her waist so her baby could sit on it while she held her. Nifty little invention. The boy was quite loud and very energetic. His mom had to scold him in swiss a couple times. Sounds like German, but not. It sounded funny and all the rubber necks in the surrounding vacinity would turn to watch where this strange shouting language was coming from. The boy accidently ran into Yumi a couple times and then stared at the two of us in fear. After he did that, he went on to suck on his sisters feet behind his mother. He did this and my eyes bugged out. I was like...interesting. He kept doing it and the baby wasn't doing anything to complain. The mother started casing him around in a circle like a dog chasing his tail. Quite humorous, but the boy went a little too far and then tripped and fell a couple times. She scolded him and then he went to play with papa.
The baby, who has started teething and has a couple, then started to take notice of us and her huge eyes in her tiny little head was so cute. She was staring at us and reaching for us. Yumi gave her her index finger and the baby grabbed a hold of it. As soon as he had grabbed her finger, he threw it into her mouth and started nibbling it and drooling everywhere. The mother was giggling and Yumi was laughing. Then the brother saw this and got pissed. He ran over to Yumi and started pushing her and punching her and yelling. The mother made him stop. Apparently he is very protective of his little sister. He won't let the leader of their playgroup hold her. She said that its better he is protective than apathetic. The little girl then moved onto Yumi's fist and drooling over that as well as herself and everything.
We finally made it to the desks and the mother put the baby in the baby cart and the girl started crying. And of course, just as Yumi and I were going up, it was time to change the passport checkers. More time we had to wait. The guy scoured Yumi's passport to make sure it wasn't fake. With mine, he didn't look at my picture, just sent me thru. After that we headed to the second checkpoint.
This was quicker, about 10 minutes.
We hit up McD's just to look at the map and make a plan of attack. We headed to Senado square, the famous walking street and walked around looking for shopping opportunities. It was nice. The weather was quite warm today, very hot, but not too bad on the humidty front, which helped loads. It was very sunny. Thank God Yumi lent me her sunscreen which is this japanese stuff that is 50 SPF. It worked loads. I was in the sun the whole day and I don't have any burn what so ever, even with all the sweating. I wonder how many health hazards it contains. Yumi has this dire desire of not to be blackened by the sun. Almost paranoia...like most of the chinese, and japanese. They all want to be white. Yumi's skin is already naturally very white, so I don' t know why she bothers with buying stuff that will help make her whiter. Its a culture thing I guess. Kinda like the Romans, only, the Japanese and Chinese aren't drinking lead tainted water to do it.
We walked all around in and out of shops. We then headed to the ruins of a catholic church. A very famous church/sightseeing site in Macau. One wall still stands of the ruins and its the front fact of the church. Behind it are tombs of the people that worked there and also some art that was in the church. During the trip thru the small museum, I had to give Yumi a crash course in the history of the Catholic church since the first split. I aslo had to give a quick explanation on why Christ was killed. The best way i was able to do it was thru a political point of view, "He was a revolutionary who threatened those in power and he was killed because of it." I tried to explain more, but it was too hard to explain. There was also a painting hanging in the gallery which showed the crucifixtion of 26 Christians in Nagasaki, Japan. Actually, it was 32, the other 6 martyrs were Jesuits which were omitted from the picture because of political reasons at the time. This was around 1640 and all christians were kicked out of Japan at this time. Yumi said she remember learning about this in her history classes. The Japanese authorities would lay down a painting of Christ on the crucifix and have people suspected of being Christians walk on it. Those who wouldn't were taken into custody and killed.
After that, we took some pictures there and I got yelled at for apparently walking somewhere that I shouldn't have been, but there were no signs saying not too. We headed next door to the Macau fortress for some more sightseeing. It was very pretty. We then hit up the museum there and there was some interesting stuff.
Afterwards we headed back to Senado square and it was getting around 415pm so we found a taxi and got to the barrier gate around 430pm and it took us about another 45 minutes to get thru the checkpoints. We wanted to do some shopping n stuff, so we went into the Gongbei Shopping mall to have some dinner and have an hour of shopping. We got a pizza pie, but it turned out to be 6 inches wide with four slices, but luckily neither of us were too hungry. After that, we split up to go shopping.
I tried to buy things, i really did, but nothing caught my eye. Its all the same junk. Crappy clothes that I don't need or junky jewelry. The only thing that I could possibly want was DVDs, and they were all pretty much crap. I did find 3 though. I picked up a Japanese movie, the new Zatoichi, a Korean mideval war flick called Sword in the Moon, and a movie about the last 12 days of Hitler at the end of WWII. THe first two I found in an actual store, the Hitler flick was found among the tons of obvious bootlegs. I found a bunch of films I wanted, including Revenge of the Sith, The Aquatic Life of Steve Zasou, and The Woodsman. However, I wanted to see them on a TV and view them before I unknowingly purchased any crap. Of course, most were rip offs or the wrong films. Woodsman didn;t look right. The Aquatic Life had "Propery of ...." watermarked on the video, and ROTS was Attack of the Clones in disguise. I don't understand why the police don't crack down on these people, if they just followed the leads, they could help take out Piracy in action. Boggles my mind.
I refused to buy any of them except the Hitler flick, because that looked resonable. My decision to just take the one really pissed off the guy trying to sell them to me. He made it obvious by slamming the DVDs on the table and being all huffy. I was like like, "So what, I am insulting you by not buying them. You tried to insult me first by trying to sell me crap." After that, he was like, 8rmb. I was like f that, its 6 jackhole. He laughed at was like, "You got me, you got me." He's still selling me crap, but its crap thats 6 rmb cheaper than buying the crap at the DVD shop in Xiaolan.
I was on the lookout for some boxsets, but didnt find any.
At 7pm, Yumi and I met outside the KFC and headed out to the bus and headed home at 730pm. We got back in town at 9pm and took a box taxi to the Yunna resturant were we had a snack and went our seperate ways. She doesn't have school till 930 tomorrow so she will get a well needed rest. I headed home and passed out from all the walking. That sunscreen rules. No burns and no red nose.