Macau

Saturday morning I met up with some exchange students to travel to Macau for the day.  Macau is a tiny country east of Hong Kong, bordering mainland China.  Its much like Las Vegas in the US, with tons of casinos and tourist attractions.  Its essentially the Sin City of Southeast Asia.  The cheapest way to Macau from Hong Kong is by ferry, and these con-artists sold us roundtrip tickets, that we were supposedly able to use at any time to return to Hong Kong.  After taking the MTR to Central, we boarded the 1045 ferry.  Our group of 8 consisted of 2 Danish, 1 german, 1 spanish, 3 French, and myself.

 

 When we reached Macau at noon, nobody really knew where to go, so we took a random bus into the city.  Klaus(danish) and Andy(german)  sorda had an idea of where to go, so we just took our maps and began walking to some of the different sites.  The older parts of Macau are interesting, because it used to be a Portuguese colony, therefore the buildings and roads are a combination of southern european and asian.  Our first step was to get some food, so we picked a restaurant that looked like it would have some authentic food.  I decided to adventurous and order portuguese style ox-tail.  Everyone was kinda grossed out by it, but I figured what the hell #YOLO...
Afterwards we checked out Saint Domingos Cathedral because it was close by.  There are many catholic churches in Macau from the Portuguese.

Portuguese style Ox-Tail Stew

Soon afterwards we headed to Monte Fort.  From the top you could see the stark contrast between the rich casinos and the slums of Macau.  There are two types of people in Macau, those who are rich gamblers, and those who live in poverty.

 

   Afterwards, we headed to the Ruins of St. Pauls Cathedral, and watched a lion dance.  Pretty much everyone from HKUST was in Macau at that point and we saw a lot of familiar faces.   Afterwards we wandered around for a bit more until dinner.  We ended up at another authentic restaurant, where I ordered Ox tongue.  It was actually pretty good, better than the tail.  I don't think i'll order it again though, just because of the fact that it is a tongue and I'm eating it and thats kind of gross if you think about it. 

After dinner, we headed to find a good spot to see the fireworks.  The entire city was lit up at this point.

All of the exchange kids then headed to the casino, since it is legal to gamble at 18.  At this point it was almost midnight, and a few students were heading back to the ferry.  I decided to stay with the majority and check out the casinos.  Our first stop was the Grand Lisboa.  This casino was pretty epic and its the super tall pineapple shape building in the pictures shown.  We weren't allowed to take pictures in the casino however.

 

We then headed to the Venetian, the largest casino in the world.  The floor of this casino seemed to go on forever.  I pretty much have the worst luck at chance games, so after losing some money I was ready to head back.  A group was heading back to the ferry around 330 so we got ripped off for a cab and got to the ferry, hoping to catch the 4:00.

Well this plan didn't work for the half of us who had bought the round-trip return any time voucher.   Some fat asian guy bought all of the tickets for the ferry's leaving macau until 7:00am!  He was scalping the tickets and making bank right in front of the ticket booth too and somehow thats not illegal.  At least 15 of us were then stuck at the terminal until then... Even the students who left the group at midnight weren't able to redeem a return ticket until 630 am.  I eventually passed out on the floor and woke up 10 minutes before the ferry left, almost missing it.  We finally arrived back in Hong Kong at 9am, too tired to even talk.  After being awake for pretty much 24 hours, I crashed in my room and chilled for the rest of sunday.