Magellan’s Cross in Cebu City

While the work schedule was pretty demanding, I did manage to get away for several days over Thanksgiving, and headed down to Mactan Island, just off the coast of Cebu in the Philippines. Several years ago I had read the book Over the Edge of the World by Laurence Bergreen, a nicely written work subtitled: “Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.” It described the harrowing adventures of the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who unfortunately met his end at Mactan Island in 1521, when he was slain by the local chieftain Lapu-Lapu. We stayed in Lapu-Lapu City, but didn’t go to Cebu because of that — there’s a wonderful resort & spa there now — and they’re a whole lot nicer to visitors! The first day was a bit wet, with the remains of Tropical Storm Mitag passing by — but the rest of the time was sunny & balmy & absolutely delightful.

After the HK Stock Exchange study was completed in December, I also headed over to Macau to see the Venetian, which opened last August — and, yes, it’s everything that you’ve heard. Twice the size of the U.S. version, and big enough to hold ninety 747 jumbo jets, it has hundreds of shops, thousands of rooms, three separate water canals with gondola rides, etc., etc. It’s so over-the-top that it really was quite a bit of fun.

As I walked about, I couldn’t help recalling the late Jean Baudrillard’s theories about “simulacra” and “hyper-reality” which caused such consternation in academic circles a couple of decades ago. That bit of French post-modernism suggested that fakes/counterfeits eventually became part of the real, and then ultimately became more important than the reality itself. Baudrillard had traveled around the U.S. and published a book entitled America back in the mid-1980s (which one critic noted read as “if De Tocqueville and Kerouac took a lot of benzedrine and read a lot of critical theory and drove around America writing an insane book about it.”) He suggested that Disneyland was a microcosm of the U.S., and called the country “a perfect simulacrum.” I tried to imagine Baudrillard today, strolling through the Macau Venetian.

Blue skies at The Venetian

Our afternoon ferry ride over to Macau had passed though a pea-soup of pollution haze in the Pearl River Delta, and we couldn’t see other boats, or the horizon, or even the bright lights of Macau until we were almost into the docks. But inside, the skies over the canal waterways were bright blue, with fluffy white clouds, and painted-on birds flying high. And so I was wondering — is yet another “hyper-” title now passing along to China?