The Kowloon Diaries

Macau diary

We went to Macau at the weekend for the first time in ten years and were dismayed at what it has turned into. It used to be a quaint little getaway, where you step back in time from Hong Kong and get a taste of a more rural, European culture. The old parts are still there, but they're dwarfed by the huge new casinos. We couldn't believe the size of these places, couldn't believe that there are really so many millions of people willing to come here just to gamble. (I never win when I gamble, so I don't understand the allure.)

I thought it might be glamorous like Las Vegas, but it's not at all. Inside, the casinos are opulent in a predictable, cliched sort of way. We took an obligatory gondola ride on a fake Venetian canal, and a Filipino named Guiseppe sang Santa Lucia for us. It might have been amusing, if it weren't so expensive and we hadn’t had to queue for an hour for a fifteen minute ride.

Outside, around the Cotai Strip, it's just messy, with lots of construction sites and long stretches of wasteland. We stayed in the Regency where we also stayed ten years ago. I remembered it as a decent five star place, but now it's falling apart.

We were only there for two days which probably isn't enough time to form an opinion, but I didn't get the impression that all this casino money has filtered down to the local community. The schools are still run down, the local shops and streets are still shabby. The only difference is that before Macau used to be shabby in a charming way, now it looks like it's just waiting to be torn down.

The only thing I liked was the Grand Lisboa Casino. We didn't get a chance to go outside, but from the outside it's so bizarre I couldn’t stop staring at it.

Not Really

As I'm aware that tourists wander on to this blog from time to time looking for travel information on Hong Kong, I'm feeling obliged to offer the following advice: Don't come in June, July or August because it pisses with rain the whole time.

Look at these rainfall figures: June - 18.8 rainy days per month, July - 17.8, August -  17.4. You think you'll avoid it? You think you'll be lucky? Ask yourself: When are you ever?

Lethem, Jonathan - Fortress of Solitude

I've been away, sort of. I've spent three weeks in Brooklyn, without leaving home. I've been engrossed in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which is about a white boy, Dylan Ebdus, growing up in a black ghetto in the years before Brooklyn became gentrified.

Apart from being white and once being a kid, Dylan's life has nothing in common with mine. I don't deal with gangs of bullying black kids on my way to school every day. My mother didn't abandon me, and my father isn't a reclusive artist. My best friend's dad isn't hasbeen singer turned cokehead. I've never taken hard drugs. I've never broken into a prison, or out of one, or even been in one. There's no point of contact between him and me that I can see, but I've been living his life for three weeks and loving every minute of it.

This total absorption in another world is what makes books better than cinema. Special effects can't hold a candle to a really well written, really long book. It's the ultimate virtual experience. You can live someone else's whole life, not a couple of hours, and you live it from inside their head. And because a book like this can't be read at one sitting, it takes on a life in your head in between readings. True, you need a writer as excellent as Lethem to pull it off. Not many books are as detailed as this one. But when a book is good it wipes the floor with any movie I've ever seen.

So, I've finished the book now and I'll miss Brooklyn. Technically I have been there. A week before 9/11, years before our kids were born, I accompanied S to New York on a business trip. We had dinner and saw a show with one of his customers, who then took us on a tour of Manhattan, which culminated in a drive across the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn't stop, just turned around and came back again.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Part travelogue, part personal memoir and part writing manual from the Japanese master. I was fascinated to see how Murakami connects sport and writing, which is something I've been thinking about recently too. I think, in fact, the point is that if you take on any activity seriously – whether it's sport, or art, or running a business - then you will require determination, guts and, above all, strenuous effort, and that's basically his point. Writing is hard labour, he says. It's a slightly depressing and slightly comforting conclusion.