I’ve found an open WAP by putting my laptop at the window sill here. Hopefully it’ll last through the weekend.

I made it to Macau without much hassle. From Xujiahui, I took the metro and the maglev to the airport, all told it took an hour or so for only 45 RMB which is faster (1.5h) and cheaper (130 RMB) than taking a taxi. Landing in Macau airport was a bit hard to mentally comprehend. First of all, everything is in Chinese (traditional), Portuguese and English. Everybody in the airport speaks English perfectly and the ATM machine took my Bank of China ATM card and gave me an option to withdraw either HKD or MOP (I chose the latter).

The taxi ride from the airport to the Hotel Royal Macau took 20 minutes or so and cost 50 pactas (at about 8 pactas/MOP to a USD). Originally, I’d tried to book a hostel for the trip since it was just me and I looked on a bunch of hosteling web sites and didn’t find any in Macau at all, but they did ofer a ‘budget hotel’ that I booked, the Hotel Royal Macau. Turns out it’s a 5 star hotel. Not a bad mistake to make.

After dropping my stuff off, I set off with a map on foot through the city. Macau is not that unlike some of the very quaint and small picturesque cities in Europe I’ve visited before. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Tallinn. The roads are mostly small, almost all two lanes wide that are often one way and riddled with switchbacks as the climb the hills. They’re beautifully quaint and quiet, devoid of the honking that’s so common in Shanghai. Since they climb so many hills they often have beautiful views that look down through the city. As I walked around this evening, I often and easily forgot I was in a Chinese country.

Quite accidently I made it to Largo do Senado, part of the UNESCO Heritage Site, which is beautiful. Old Portuguese buildings and fountains, all well lit and maintained make up for a wonderful walking and shopping and picture taking destination. I spent a few hours walking around the area. After getting a bit tired of walking around, I made my way to the casino part of town, near the water.

The first stop, of course, was the famous Lisboa. To get in to the gaming floors, it’s necessary to go through metal detectors and once inside it’s quite a bit unlike Vegas. First of all, it’s packed and second of all, it’s a labyrinth. The place is obviously designed to keep you inside for as long as possible. There were plenty of games being played that I’ve never seen before and I couldn’t find any roulette tables in the Lisboa, although they did have a routlette style game with dice and a lighted table that I managed to quickly lose 100 MOP on (betting on “small” when the dice rolled “big”). It feels fabled inside but it does also feel old and stuffy in the Lisboa.

I left that casino and walked around the corner to the Grand Emperor which was gaudy-beautiful. The floor of the lobby (that is shared with the hotel) has 99 gold bricks lining the floor along with a plaque for HSBC Zurich for their delivery. The second floor (which is where the casino starts) was dedicated to slots gaming and the third is all table games. I did find a roulette table in the Grand Emperor and as expectedit was a bit different than the American version. It doesn’t have 00, plus it also has extra table space for combination play.

Impression thus far? Beautiful city. Can’t wait to go out and explore in the day light tomorrow and see if my night vision holds true in the day.

On pretty much the equlivant of a whim, I’m heading to Macau tomorrow afternoon for the weekend. I’d originally planned to head over on a domestic flight to Zhuhai and take a bus or taxi in to Macau from there but the flight that would get me to Macau was pretty late and I didn’t particuarly care to risk having the border crossing be closed and risk being stuck in Zhuhai. So, I booked the flight direct to Macau (MFM) that lands in the evening (acutally, the flight I was originally booked on was cancelled, so I was bumped earlier).

In 2005, the city core of Macau was made a UNESCO World Heritage site, so I’m definintly going to check that out. Of course, there’s gambling. When looking at Macau info, I came across the name of the Casino Lisboa, which I can recall from about ten different Cold War spy novels that I’ve read over the years, all with scenes that go something like: “At 3am, go to the third blackjack table at the Lisboa, bet exactly 100 dollars and stay on whatever hand you have. The dealer will then then pass you a note where to pick of the package.”

Hopefully I’ll have some internet capability there so I’ll be blogging while I’m in the SAR and posting pictures as well.

On Monday night, on the recommendation/early scouting by Evan and Brian, we had dinner at the Din Tai Fung outpost in Xintiandi. For a restaurant that has had the honor of being called New York Times’ 10 Best in the World (or something like that), it had a lot to live up to. Being a vegetarian, I couldn’t partake in the xiaolongbao (小笼包), but did have both the steamed vegetable dumplings and the steamed vegetable buns (along with some various noodles and steamed deserts).

The dumplings were extraordinary, their wrappers being the most impressive part (translucent and supple) while the filling was fantastic. However, the tour de force for the vegetarian eater was definitely the steamed buns. The shell was both large and doughy but possible to be picked up with a set of chopsticks. The shell when combined with the vegetable and tofu filling made for a fantastic entrée quite unlike any I’ve ever had before.

So does Din Tai Fung live up to the reputation? Since I wasn’t able to have the signature dish, I can’t say but from what I ate the dumplings rivaled any I’ve had before while the buns were by far and away the best I’ve ever had.

Using simple sentences to search for structure data on the web doesn’t have to be complicated. As Spongecell and Mobissimo show, natural language parsing doesn’t have to be perfect or natural, it just has to be good enough to understand semi-structured data. For example, try on Mobissimo (you have to click on “try one box search”): “sfo to sgn april 6 – 15” which works. It’s a lot easier than clicking on six fields on the site, using a calendar widget and various drop downs. Spongecell does a good job of this too with its calendaring application. You can ‘sponge’ an event like “dinner with buddies friday at seven” instead of navigating complicated menus. Both of these sites are good enough that they’re useful. I’m sure there are tons of corner cases they miss but it doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful.

The Olympics are broadcast in China on CCTV5, one of the national broadcast stations that carries mostly sports (including NBA basketball). The voice track, of course, is all in Chinese but the titles on the picture (e.g. the signage) are in English. Thus, there will be somebody commenting on the race that just happened in Chinese but the results when displayed will be in English (such as “Womens Downhill”). I think what happens is some company (probably NBC since it looks a lot like the visuals in the states) has the global contract on the visuals of the Olympics while the individual nations do their own voice overs. It works out really well for me since I can still enjoy the Olympics while I’m here.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day in China and much like the states, it came with all the requisite flowers, restaurants and dates you’d find in the west. People were walking the streets with bouquets and street vendors everywhere were selling flowers.

A couple of us from the office tried to go to dinner at Grand Gateway, across the street from the office and were quickly rejected by a teaming mass of humanity unlike any I’ve ever encountered. Typically to get to Grand Gateway from the office, it’s easiest to take the subway tunnels under the street from Metro City and to the exit Xujiahui station gate 14. There are a set of escalators that lead from the station in to the mall. Normally it’s crowded as things are in Shanghai with people everywhere, but last night was a whole other ball game.

This time, there was a mass of people about eight bodies wide and maybe 20 deep all pushing their way for the escalator. After suffering through that we made it up only to have half our party stranded at the bottom as the security guards reversed the direction of the escalators to stop the flow of people and disperse the crowd. For the half of us that were upstairs, it was complete chaos where all the balconies of the building in the middle foyer were full of people, eight stories high looking down at the performance on the ground floor. It was just pure unadulterated Valentine’s day chaos.

It’s been a few weeks but I’m now back in Shanghai. My trip to the states was great. Outside of spending a lot of time in the office catching up with folks, I got to see a lot of friends and enjoy my time in SF. I spent last week at my parents house in the east coast before the big snow storm hit and did a day in NYC, seeing the Guggenheim with my mom and had dinner with Derek. I went back to SF for the weekend, had an excellent dinner at Bacar, hung out with friends and watched copious amounts of Olympics on TV. I flew out Sunday afternoon and got back to China Monday night and am now back in the office, back to the grind.

It’s a bit odd being back again, yet strangely familiar. One of the more interesting things is the reverse sticker shock. When I went back to the states, the prices for food and such seemed so hight, and now being back food seems so cheap. I had breakfast today for something like $0.40. We have a bunch of folks in town this week and next to kick off some projects so it’s going to be quite busy which is always a good way to get back in to the swing of things.

With no interest in the teams playing this year, I watched the Superbowl for two reasons and two reasons alone: 50+” HDTV at my parents place and commercials. The former was awesome, the latter left a lot for want. The best ones were definitly the FedEx caveman ad(“that’s not my problem”) and the Sprint ad about the crime deterrent feature but I really wasn’t impressed by the rest. Oh and yes, I’m now in the East Coast, in New Jersey.

Yesterday I met up with Jamus, Pam and Justin at the Cheeseboard Collective‘s pizza store in Berkeley (on Shattuck and Vine). I’ve heard lots of good things about the pizza place, from it’s distinctive menu (they only serve one pizza a day) to the masses who teem outside the store during the lunch hour. We were not let down. The pizza was a zucchini basil pesto (mozzarella, red onions, zucchini, feta and basil) and was excellent. There was a line snaking out the door and for a few store-fronts-worth on the sidewalk as well. People had taken seat where every they could to enjoy the pie, from benches and tables on the sidewalk to the grassy median on the street (ignoring the “don’t sit on the median” sign). I want to go back to try the other pies they bake and if they’re anything like the one we had, I doubt I’ll be dissapointed.