Macau
Aaron and I arrived late in the evening to Macau's airport, and caught a shuttle van to the city center. After the ramshackle chaos of the Phillipines, landing in Macau felt like travelling forward in time. We drove the smooth highway and passed the bright lights of casinos, notably the City of Dreams and the Venetian, the #2 and #1 largest casinos in the world. We checked into our downtown hotel with high hopes for fun in the "Vegas of Aisa". It was not to be. Macau has triple the annual gaming revenue of Las Vegas, but it has none of the fun. We walked through the gigantic Grand Lisboa into the massive gaming area. We saw baccarat card tables as far as the eye could see. Each table was filled, mostly with Chinese men, all smoking up a grey cloud. The room was practically silent. No bands playing, no slot machines bleeping and clanging, no jubilant winners shouting and cheering. Just chain-smoking Chinese hunched over their cards deep in concentration. We found the single bar in the football field sized room. It was empty. The two bartenders looked nearly asleep. We felt bad awakening them from their slumber for a couple glasses of Tsingtao.
We took a long lap around the room to see if we were missing some excitement, tucked away in an alcove, then bailed on this lame Chinese version of Vegas.
We walked towards the waterfront to the area of bars and restaurants known as "The Docks". Reputed to be the nightlife area of Macau, we found only a couple places open, and nearly no one inside. A tourism based city of a half million people, seemingly has nothing going on on a Thursday night. We headed home early. I've discovered that thus far in my travels, the absolute worst nightlife is to be found in Chinese cities. Beijing brought boredom, Shanghai was somnambulant, Singapore seemed stodgy, Taipei was too tame, Macau, kinda monotonous. I was now worried for our upcoming days in Hong Kong. Would they be humdrum?
The next morning we did an obligatory walk around the World Heritage Site historic center of Macau. The mosaic tiles were very nice, and the old Portuguese architecture was pleasing. Though the preponderance of Prada and Gucci and Versace stores seemed less historic. After a couple hours sweating in the hot sun and randomly stumbling into an ice skating rink, we made our way to the hydrofoil ferry to Kowloon.
