Instead of celebrating Handover Day with the rest of HK on July 1, we hopped on a ferry and ran off to Macau -- still a Portuguese colony then, now once again under China's administration. The switch was made in December, only a few months after we left.

Upon arriving on the northernmost island (there are actually 3: Macau, Taipa, and Coloane,) we hopped a bus for the maritime museum and the A-Ma temple, passing by glittering casinos downtown on the way. (Gambling, illegal except for horseracing in HK, is apparently a major reason that Hong Kong residents throng to Macau on the weekends.) At the museum, we learned the legend that Macau was originally settled by traders lost at sea, then guided to safe harbor by a vision of a goddess. Out of gratitude, they founded the temple, which has now grown into an elaborate complex sprawling up the hillside, its shrines mingled with bamboo and tropical vegetation. The temple intrigued me, although I felt (as I always did when visiting sacred sites in and around HK) appallingly ignorant of the religious traditions behind it.

Still, the temple and the museum together reminded me of how close the relationship is between islands and sea here. I thought of my own landlocked home state, and how different it was to live in a place where transport by boat was part of daily life; some people even commuted by ferry. Both in Hong Kong and in Macau, you never forgot the nearness and omnipresence of the sea. The cities perch on the edge of the ocean, eating from it, spewing waste into it. I thought of the dinners we'd had: fish, crabs, prawn dumplings at dim sum, sea bass at the Portuguese restaurant we visited later that day. I thought of the typhoon that disrupted my first day of work. Boats, ships, storms, goddesses.

And even more than HK, Macau made me reflect on the consequences of European colonialism. I'm not so crazy as to call them all good, but the sight of trilingual sings hanging above Macanese shops -- advertising in Cantonese, English, and Portuguese -- was amazing to me, and I couldn't help feeling an appreciation of the unique mixture of cultures that had emerged in this place. I couldn't help thinking that mixtures such as these are precious, although the process that led to them may not have been admirable or humane.