Lost language: how Macau gambled away its past
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I never understood this wholesale copying (Its not just China, look at Las Vegas). Do people actually like being in a fake Eiffel Tower? Wouldn't it be much better for a city with history like Macau to emphasize that instead?
This is what I've been told but in reality it seems a bit like GDP fudging, with endless construction projects.
It's quite entertaining, and pretty expensive for Chinese standards (180 CNY, about 28 USD).
This was what I've heard more than few times from people who went to Macau thinking it'd be like Vegas and walking away very disappointed.
I guess when you don't diversify your economy and go all in on one sector like gambling, it tends to neglect other parts of what makes a country and culture interesting.
Sort of like Vancouver, with a huge chunk of it's economy depending on rising housing prices.
However, the gambling industry in Macao dwarfs Vegas, with revenue 7 times as high or so (it fluctuates sharply, depending on how many people China lets go there and how much it cracks down on corruption).
I recommend seeing the protestant cemetery - small courtyard attached to a chapel, and the tombstones tell poignant little stories, allowing a glimpse into a sliver of life (and death) at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Protestant_Cemetery_(Macau...
I lived all over Macau, but for many years near Hac Sa beach in Coloane. I read a book "I Sailed with Chinese Pirates" by Aleko E. Lilius first published in 1930 with lurid accounts of pirates and murder as the forward reads. I used to stare out my window at the islets off the coast and imagine Lai Choi San the famous woman pirate!
Lovely, taken from the linked blog. https://belamaquista.wordpress.com/
This written expression is easy to parse, though. It's just spelling variation of an idiomatic expression that really means: "[Someone who's] always looking for trouble..."
In this case, you could present that phrase to any Cape Verdean person without the context, and they'd tell you it's definitely Cape Verdean creole (which is also Portuguese-based), if slightly oddly transcribed.
To give you a better idea of the similarities, a native Cape Verdean creole speaker (of the Barlavento dialect) would probably write something like: "Tud óra êl tâ bscá sarna pa coçá." The exact same simplifications of grammar and pronunciation, even though the Portuguese was mixed with completely different languages in each case. How cool is that?
Compare that with Guangzhou, which also has a ton of migrant inflow from other provinces but with a large local populace - if you walk down any given street you'll still hear Cantonese spoken pretty often, though Mandarin is more frequently used (since it's the common tongue.)
I love the HK 80s movies - cop dramas, ro-coms, etc... I like to make the completely silly comparisoin that Cantonese is like Brooklyn english compared to Mandarin which is like British english. It's got so much flavor. I love HK and Macau for that, and I wish I has spent more time in Guangzhou where some of my buddies were from and Cantonese is spoken.