Come on over!

Hey everyone! While doing a little cleaning up on the blog I noticed there are quite a few of you still hanging out here every day. Why don't you head on over to where the action is? Find out what's going on currently at My Wandering Life! You'll be glad you did!

Big News

Hey friends! We've got some pretty big changes in the pipeline.

The kind of changes that make a blog called Wandering Macau somewhat of a misnomer.

The days in this space are numbered, so I want to invite you to my new one: My Wandering Life. Head on over there right now for all the details on the latest adventure for me and my three guys!

Not hungry anymore...

My pal Patience

In America we have a ridiculous amount of giant stores that stock everything you could possibly need. Places like Target or Costco where you can do your grocery shopping for the week (including meat, dairy, bread, fresh fruit and veg as well as canned goods), fill your prescription, get a new outfit, buy a bicycle, get motor oil, and have enlargements made of your favorite vacation photo. You might end up paying a little more if you buy everything in one stop instead of shopping around, but at least you have that option. In Macau there is nothing remotely like that.

I buy my meat at the frozen meat shop, where I can get chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and sausage which is all imported from other parts if the world, frozen raw and waiting for me to thaw and cook it (though admittedly I tend not to cook meat very often). I buy my bread at a bakery, where it comes in loaves of six slices for about $1.25 USD. It is fresh each day, with no preservatives and in this humid environment it grows mold in 48 hours if it isn't consumed. I buy fruit and veg from an outdoor market, where each stall sells a different type of produce. I buy all the canned goods and spices from a grocery store, one of four or five that all stock different items. I get dairy from two of the grocery stores, when it is in stock. When I say that it takes seven hours to get the ingredients for one meal, it's not an exaggeration.

It's the same for non-food products. If I need to buy shoes for the boys, I go to the shoe store. If I need keys made, I go to a tiny stall where a man sits all day doing nothing but making keys. When I needed to replace an obscure lightbulb that had blown out, I went to a narrow shop that sells little else than obscure lightbulbs.

I miss The Home Depot back in the States. A store devoted to anything related to the home, including lightbulbs, key duplicating, paint, plumbing, curtains, plants, and lumber. I especially missed it recently when we had to replace the little screen inside our faucet that aerates the water as it comes out. Ours was so corroded that hardly a trickle came through. We carried the piece around in a baggie, trying to find a place that might stock that kind of thing. We tried at the key stall, the lightbulb shop, a place that sells chains and rubber work boots, all to no avail. Finally we stopped at a place that looked like it could be featured on an episode of Hoarders... Stuffed from floor to ceiling with all manner of tiny fittings and random odds and ends, barely an aisle to admit just one person (in the photo below). A group of men were smoking and chatting at the entrance. We handed our piece to the man who looked most likely to be the shopkeeper, and off he went to the back and up a ladder, opening drawers and sliding things around. He returned with the tiny screen, and charged us about a quarter.

I can't imagine how all of these tiny shops stay in business, especially when it appears people are more interested in stopping in to chat than in plunking down cash for goods. But I guess this is why small towns in the United States complain when the big stores come and try to build. All those little shops become a redundant waste of time.

If I had to pick the biggest change I've seen in myself since moving to Macau last year, it would be the abundant amount of patience I've had to develop. Things take exponentially more time here than they do in always open, guaranteed in stock Los Angeles. And I have all these little shops and stalls to thank for the growth of my patience. But I won't go so far to say this is a better life... I do miss picking up sandals and bread and a good book, all while my kids eat a hot dog as my tires are being rotated. I also hope that if and when the day comes when we get to shop at Costco again, I won't take that for granted!

Location, Location, Location

My father worked in the film and television industry while I was growing up. I dabbled in it as well, banking enough money from the occasional extra gig throughout middle school to pay for my first year of college (my big claim to fame is appearing over the shoulder of John Cusack in the cult classic Say Anything). My dad only worked in and around the Los Angeles area, which doubled for just about any location throughout the world. He took particular delight in pointing out the alley in "New York" which is actually right off Grand, or street in "Japan" which is right in Downtown L.A.

Living in the Los Angeles area can be like living on a movie set. Little House on the Prairie filmed in the hills of the town I grew up in, and the spooky house from Poltergeist was a mile away from my non-famous house. The TV show Dexter regularly filmed in the last city we lived in, and our old local Home Depot shopping center was used for filming of some sort every other month. One of the best "gifts" my dad ever gave me was a drive by of the famous steps where Laurel and Hardy pushed a piano up and watched it fall back down ad nauseam (seen here in color). I was about 10 and being in a bad neighborhood, I wasn't allowed to get out of the car. But it was magical to my star-struck eyes.

This is not Hong Kong!

When I watch any movie, half my mind is occupied with trying to figure out where it was filmed. A few months after we moved here, the movie Bridesmaids finally came to Macau. I went to see it by myself and found I could barely pay attention to the film because I was so thrilled to see what was in the background... the town where I ran track and cross-country as a young girl. Later Michael and I went to see Johnny English Reborn with Rowan Atkinson here in Macau. The opening scenes give you the location as Hong Kong... but the real location was literally one block away from the movie theater we were sitting in! The audience went a little wild at the discrepancy.

The movie Contagion came out in the States while we lived here, and I was anxiously awaiting its release in Macau. Of course, once my friends in the U.S. told me the film depicts a lethal virus spreading all over the world which starts in Macau, I realized it would never show here in the theater. Too negative. So we rented it on iTunes and laughed at every scene they showed depicting "Macau"... all quite obviously filmed in Hong Kong.

My favorite building in Hong Kong is the Bank of China Tower, which I'm certain you'll recognize from any movie that ever featured Hong Kong. And we just saw a movie tonight where it is sliced in half by an alien ship, coming to rest in Victoria Harbour just feet away from the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, site of the 1997 handover ceremony when Great Britain gave Hong Kong back to China.

The movie was Battleship, which I've been mocking for awhile... a movie based on a board game that looks like it's trying to be Transformers? Puh-leeze! But a local friend here saw it a couple days ago and based on his recommendation we went to see it. Pleasant surprises throughout, and the Hong Kong footage was a bonus. Just checked IMDb and see that it doesn't even come out in the States until May 18th. So that's pretty sweet and almost-sorta-kinda makes up for seeing most other films weeks and months after they come out in the States. But you know what I'm really looking forward to? The Avengers, which comes out next week on April 26th here in Macau, and features scenes filmed in Los Angeles among other places. We've already got our tickets. And once again a quick check to IMDb shows it doesn't open in the States until May 4th! Sorry to my friend Lori, who will have to wait an extra week to see her Captain Hottie. Unless she can catch an early screening of it... always a possibility in film capital L.A.!

P.S. I blame my husband for forcing me to like all these recent films based on comic books. He dragged me to them until I was the one dragging him. I suppose being mom to only boys contributes!

Ah ha!

This explains the footprints on the toilet seats around town. And why almost all the public toilet seats are broken. People are using them all wrong.

Wait... What am I supposed to do?