Macau

Macau is a former Portuguese colony that boasts of casinos and cheap furniture, as well as Portuguese food. There are rumours that many Triad members live here. They also sell crab congee - a huge yellow and orange steamed crab is perched on top of a bowl of rice gruel mixed with crab roe. Chinese Sad Associate and I ate it all up, crunching on the shells.

We walked up many streets with shiny white cobbling, past the pastel-coloured narrow colonial buildings, into a shop that was so crammed with furniture you had to make sure to move very carefully for fear of breaking something. The shopkeeper and Chinese Sad Associate soon got down to business and while they were discussing things at the shopkeeper's desk I wandered around the place to get a better look.

The furniture is manufactured in mainland China, then shipped to Macau. Nearly everything was wood, and the bronzed decorative knobs and hinges together with the dark lacquer made it look better than any high-end Chinoiserie I have seen before.  The shop smelled of lacquered wood everywhere.  I tried sitting on all of the delicate looking chairs and found them quite comfortable without any cushioning. There were a couple of red lacquered water buckets which I thought would look quite nice as decorations in my flat. While I was trying to work out whether it is the 'done' thing to display water buckets (however lacquered, they are water buckets, afterall) or not, Chinese Sad Associate was having a mild tantrum about the price of a chest she was buying.
"Gau bat!" she kept yelling. That means 'nine hundred' in Cantonese. The shopkeeper was grinning and complaining at the same time. I looked down at the sheet of paper they were fighting over and saw the figure 1,100 in the shopkeeper's neat handwriting.
"Your friend is a professional bargainer," the shopkeeper's assistant said to me, smiling.
"She's a lawyer, so she ought to be," I said. Chinese Sad Associate was waving her hands about and still yelling, "Gau bat!". I continued lounging about in the wooden rocking chair I had found in a corner while Chinese Sad Associate took a walk about the shop, every now and then stopping to say to the shopkeeper, "Gau bat!". In the end, the shopkeeper capitulated.

We celebrated the discount by getting egg tarts fresh from the oven at a nearby bakery. They were crisp and brown on the top and deliciously aromatic in the middle - nothing like the soggy ones I remembered from bad Chinese restaurants in London. 
"Now for milk pudding!"  Chinese Sad Associate said, her eyes twinkling. The milk pudding shop served us white, bean-curd like chilled dessert while we sat amidst plaster-casts of brown and white spotted cows.  Near the lily-covered fountain, a high school orchestra decked out in pressed white uniforms struck up, the first note of the trumpets sounding flat and limp in the white sunlight.