Egg Tarts

Another rainy day in a week of blustery weather. In the last few days hail and wind have wrecked buildings and ravaged farmer's crops. The wind has blown down the mainstage at the Big Valley Jamboree and blown some building material from the eighteenth story of a construction site near the Calgary Tower. Two people have died. No flooding though, I think. We get that some years.

Calgary gets it hard and wet and windy, but the rain doesn't visit for long. It doesn't get a season of its own like it does in other countries. One rainy night when I lived in Korea, I went downtown to a bar where lots of expats hung out. There was a Filipino guy on the karaoke mic, singing loudly while putting back a beer. My friend at the bar told me that he'd received the news that day that his family's home in the Philippines had been destroyed by a typhoon. He was trying to get it out of his mind for a while.

I got stranded by a typhoon once. I was in Macau on the south coast of China. Like Hong Kong, Macau is its own "Special Administrative Region" and requires going through customs and immigration to get to and from the mainland. I was there for a few days en route to Hong Kong when the typhoon hit. The city shut down: the buses stopped, the shops and restaurants closed, planes were grounded, boats stayed in dock, even the China border closed. I was inconvenienced on two counts: I was supposed to leave for Hong Kong that day; and, I'd developed a Portuguese egg tart habit. The eggs tarts of Macau have the most delicate flaked crusts and the savouriest egg fillings. I've since had egg tarts in Hong Kong and in Canadian Chinatowns, but they've never lived up to the Macanese tarts. So here I was, unable to leave for Hong Kong, faced with shuttered bakeries. Fortunately, the casinos were open. Deep in the gilded bowels of the Casino Lisboa I found a bakery. I spent the day sitting in my tiny hostel with the other stuck travellers, watching the rain and eating egg tarts.