Inside Macau

It was sunny on Wednesday. An excellent day to be up and about. Why not go and take a look at some of the "new" hotels in Macau which were constantly on the lips of some of my friends and practice a little my skills in amateur photography just taken up in mid-April? I never really had time to visit them although I had been in Macau a number of times in the last couple of years in connection with my work.

I was in for some pleasant surprises. Obviously some serious thought had been put in to make the environment as pleasant and enjoyable as possible.

Let the photographs tell their own story.

I like the parabolas described in the air by the jets of water of the wavy fountains outside the City of Dreams, now high, now low, rising and falling in synchrony with the rhythm of the  of force driving them. 

 

I like the shimmer upon the surface of the water as the ripples radiate out from where the jets of falling water first hit the surface of the pool and get progressively weaker as they move further and further from where the waves started until when they reach the side of the pool they are  reduced to barely visible tiny wavelets which reflects and refracts the sunlight into miniscule spectra of rainbow colors.

I like the mutual reflection of the water and the window panes on the adjacent steel and glass hotel wall.

Close by, we see the outlines of another hotel. I like the the blue sky and white clouds upon its wall of glass. Standing erect at the bottom of the reflected clouds, we find the outlines of yet another hotel(?)!

I also like the shape of the various blocks forming part of the hotel.

and also the water cascading down its side.

It was a completely different world once you get inside the building.
My eyes were caught by the ceiling lights.

As I moved along, there were other ceiling delights.

As I looked down to my right along the corridor, I discovered other interesting patterns.

At a corner Japanese restaurant, I found my own corner of delight.

As I looked up, I discovered some colored wooden panels rather like those one finds in the works of a Mondrian or an Arp.

It was a world of human artifice where we never see the light of day, a world of plasters, paints, columns, metal and various forms of electronic lights.

I walked further down the corridor and found myself inside a half world of scarlet, orange and yellow reflected from the shiny surface of a huge steel or aluminium-plated round column beneath a forest of orange and yellow ceiling lamps,. It felt like a completely technology dominated world where man can recover a slither of his humanity only in all night boozing, dancing and drug trips, a world in which one wishes that the night would somehow never end and in which nothing and no one can appear except through the distorting surface of that shiny and curved mechanical mirror, a world where the boundaries between dream and reality have become completely fuzzy or even obliterated.  It was a world in which one can hardly distinguish the source of light and other images from its reflection upon either the sheen of the mirror like floor tiles or that on the burnished surface of the steel/ aluminium plated columns.

I wandered further and found myself at the reception hall of the Grand Hyatt. Right in the middle of the hall, there was a huge egg where water was constantly flowing down in film-like liquid cascades.  The light from the ceiling was vying with the light flooding in from the wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows to create complicated patterns of flickering blues and golds. 

A hint of nature was however permitted to enter in the form of pebbles and bleached sand.

The sun too was allowed in, but only through some artificial lines.

Perhaps to relieve a little the completely artificial atmosphere inside and to try to bring a little of the sunshine from the world of Nature into the hotel lobby, they placed a large number of orchids on a huge table at a part of the reception hall just before the exit for the taxi stand.

I shall post photos of "Out and About in Macau" of this day trip in a separate blog.