Hong Kong and Macau

I would have written sooner, but I was sick with a fever and slept in bed all week. I have been reading Little Women because we found a copy in a bookstore in Hong Kong, and I would have been reading it, too, except that I was at the part where Beth is ill with scarlet fever and has a sore throat and a headache and stays in bed for days, which, needless to say, I did not feel like reading in that context.

Hong Kong was really fun. It felt much more Western, while still feeling Chinese enough. We also could find some good old Western things that you can't find in the rest of China, like American-style shopping malls, electronics, bookstores, and movie theaters. And salt-and-vinegar chips. We got the iPods that we'd been wanting for Christmas. Mine is purple! And I can put exactly whatever songs I want on it! Yay!

We also went to Macau, which was a Portuguese colony for 400 years until 1999. It literally feels like Mediterranean Europe, except that everyone is Asian. The street food is just great!!! There is the front of an old Portuguese church, with all of the sides gone, and nearby is a big park and a stone fort that you can walk around on top. Now Macau has become a kind of Las Vegas of the East, so there is a big, ugly casino-hotel that dominates the horizon, and a number of the cannons on the top of the fort were pointed straight at the building, so John and I had fun pretending to shoot it down.