Rmx

So I'm back from nearly one month around East Asia, the furthest I've ever been from home in Brazil. I was travelling with 9 friends and hardly had the time to write my own travel journal (as I like to do when I'm travelling by myself), let alone blog or update Wikitravel articles on the go, but it was a trip I definitely loved.

I'd been looking forward to visiting Macau for some time, but not for the casinos and gambling the city is well-known for. I was excited when our passports got stamped at the arrivals hall of the ferry from Hong Kong, and even more so when we finally got to the Senate's Square, the old city's epicentre. Looking at its very fine set of Portuguese buildings and all the street signs and store names written in Portuguese, I had this strange feeling that, although the people on the street looked nothing like home, we had some sort of common cultural heritage that would connect us in a way.

Loking back at it now, I wouldn't be that confident. Besides helping navigate street maps and signs, speaking Portuguese wasn't very useful. Nobody we met, even at the tourist offices, would speak a word of the language. Taxi drivers would give it a puzzled look when shown an address written in latin script. Even the way the Macauese pronounce Portuguese names sounds completely weird for us "natives". No wonder the Macau article on Portuguese Wikitravel hasn't had any edits in one year. I had the impression that the Macauese are (understandably) not that proud of their colonial past. I suppose it won't be very long before Portuguese is dropped as one of the city's official languages. Until then, the people of Macau will probably live this cultural schizophrenia: having to write in a language that is no longer theirs (was it ever?) while using a completely different language on their daily lives.

Likewise, the Portuguese and Portuguese-influenced food I tasted there also wasn't very convincing, to be honest. The pastéis de nata (egg tarts) would taste more like an omelet and the rather expensive bacalhau dish, which had but a few chops of codfish, was a pale imitation of the real thing.

Not that I would travel around the globe to keep speaking my mother tongue and eating food I can get two streets down the block, but I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed in this case. Walking around, looking at the architecture, taking loads of pictures and getting the general feeling of a place that is, nevertheless, very different from mainland China, would eventually make up for it.