Carol and my roommates and I took a trip about town last Sunday, August 7. We visited the ruins of the church of St. Paul (seen above) along with lots of other tourists. According to my Lonely Planet guidebook, this is considered "the most treasured icon in Macau." It was "designed by an Italian Jesuit and completed by early Japanese Christian exiles and Chinese craftsmen in 1602. It was abondoned after the expultion of the Jesuits in 1762 and a military battalion was stationed here. In 1835 a fire errupted in the kitchen of the barracks, destroying everything except what you see today."
I'm pictured above with Jess and Angie, my fun-loving roommates.
A brunch of dim sum hit the spot. These are nai huang bao (Mandarin) or lai wang bao (Cantonese). Either way, the sweetened-yolk-filled buns are delicious.
Here, we visited the Pawn Shop Museum. Angie did not give us a very good price for my sunglasses or Jess' Kleenex. Oh well. It's interesting that this kind of business thrives wherever there is gambling, no matter what part of the world. The red partition behind us was put there in order to shield customers from the prying eyes of on-lookers and to provide some measure of privacy.
We also visited the Church of St. Dominic. It is "a 17th-century baroque church" which is "a replacement of a chapel built in the 1590s. Today it contains the Treasury of Sacred Art, an Aladdin's cave of ecclesiastical art and liturgical objects exhibited on three floors." Aladdin's cave, indeed. Some tasteful objects (above) were strangely paired with somewhat less-tasteful objects (below). It looked like a church cleaned out its attic, to me.
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