The concept of "home"

After a wonderful weekend, i'm back, screwed for school... but left with many fantastic memories. To start off, it was Mid-Autumn Festival over here in HK... and when they celebrate - they celebrate! It was a shame that we couldn't spend the whole weekend here, but we went to Macau (which i will elaborate on later) which is the "Sin City of AP". 

On Saturday, I went to my uncle's place to "sew haw" or BBQ. Their version of BBQ in HK kicks Canada's butt (although i do love the bbq there too). We use actual charcoal and make our wings, sausages... etc. I even tried bbqed pineapple (random, i know) and it was pretty good. So it was a solid weekend (more shopping of course). 

On Sunday morning we went to Macau via the 1 hr ferry ride. An overview of Macau: it was originally settled by the Portuguese and then turned into a major tourist Las Vegas style city hence the term "Sin City of AP". It's a very strange blend of old Portuguese buildings including many cathedrals and old buildings. It has all the chinese buildings which look somewhat like the old parts of HK. There are also a bunch of Las Vegas style hotels. My favorites were the Venetian (pretty much its own city in one building) and MGM. There's also the famous Wynn that just opened in Vegas. Macau is also separated into 2 islands - Macau and Taipa. All in all, the city is quite small, but unlike the strip, it's very hard to get around since the hotels are spread out all the over the place. I found Macau itself quite disorienting cause there is no common theme. The city seems like just a mixture of stuff and they just built stuff where-ever they wanted to. I'm not sure if there was any urban planning involved. I was also thinking about how the locals feel about having all these hotels popping up all over the place that is there to facilitate the needs of those with too much money on their hands. In addition, the smog is unreal... way worse than HK. You cannot even see the ocean from the terminal at times because the smog spreads so far. Again it makes me wonder how much of this is worth it... since the majority of smog is from all the free shuttles back and forth from the hotels (although it was nice to have all these free rides). 

Anyways... the highlights of my trip were Cirque du Soleil's "Zaia" and Portuguese tarts (omg the best friggin pastries i have ever tasted). Cirque was absolutely amazing... i saw the one that played in Calgary and it does not even compare to this one... there was fire... yes... FIRE! The music was also amazing (however, it's so new that i wasn't able to get the soundtrack :() and I loved the theme which was basically a journey through space and going around the globe - internationalism is sexy. 

The reason why I titled this blog about the concept of "home" is that when we were heading home I genuinely missed HK and kept saying that i want to go "home". It's strange to say this since my entire life has been centered around Calgary. I never thought I would say that about HK, but it's what it's going to be like for the next 3 months (yay to my 3 week anniversary here!). So then my next big question is: what is the concept of "home" if i'm able to say this about HK so quickly?