Tag: macau

I’m back in Tuen Mun after a second crack at Macau this weekend. I traveled with a group of seven others, which is a bit large for my taste but ended up working out decently enough.

This time I wasn’t miserable from unexplained sudden blistering on my feet, so I was able to enjoy everything more. We took the ferry from Sheung Wan on Hong Kong Island this time, which is actually about as close (in transit time) as the much (physically) closer TST China ferry pier. We stayed at the Sun Sun Best Western, fairly close to Largo do Senado (the central square)—but everything in Macau is pretty close to everything else.

Since it was the first trip to Macau for many in the group, we didn’t make it to the islands. Maybe next time. Or the time after that.

We saw the usual sights. New ones for me included a long walk up and around the Guia hill/fortress/lighthouse complex, the Lou Lim Ioc (sp?) gardens, walking in the Leal Senado, and generally a lot of walking around the more central and eastern parts of the peninsula. We largely neglected the north and south, and stayed more or less in the west (which is pretty boring).

Claiming a bed in this Best Western was a bad idea as I was destroyed by what seemed to be a bed full of some creature. My panicked laundry session and careful isolation on returning seems to have worked, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Last night I had a set of merged welts from bites almost entirely covering my right bicep, but the magic of Mopiko has me looking a little less freakish today.

Once again the walking around (unencumbered by blisters) was my favorite part, or would have been if it weren’t for the food. For Saturday’s lunch we tried a Portuguese place called Boa Mesa near L. do Sen., which seemed to be well-received by the group. For dinner we found a semi-Shanghainese place near the casinos where I tried the famous xiao long bao, or soup dumplings. I had the crabmeat version. Look them up, they’re fun—a literal flavor explosion. After going to Portuguese Mass at the cathedral (one of the least impressive I’ve seen, but hey, it’s in China) and getting ice cream, Sunday’s lunch was at the Café Chocolà on the same alley (Travessa do São Domingo, maybe?), a café pretending to be Italian but with obvious Portuguese food. I had a set lunch of a mushroom torte with soup (cream and vegetable) and salad (boring, but with plenty of azeite [olive oil]), a papaya–sweet lime (tasted a bit like Key lime) shake, and pigged out with a guardanapo (literally, napkin… or a rocambole (sp?) to Brazilians) afterward. Most of the others had very reasonably priced and pretty good-looking baguettes.

I’ve now been to a casino (a couple) for the first time in my life. We went in both the Wynn and the Lisboa on Saturday night. It’s easy to see why the Stanley Ho/STDM monopoly (e.g. the Lisboa) is losing business. Popular games (for people with more money than I) are baccarat and sik-bo (big-little, a Chinese dice game that has gameplay and odds similar to a wheel-less roulette). I got tremendously lucky on a ten-cent slot machine (ten HK cents… heh) and wound up pulling myself out of the red and cashing out 30 HKD in the black. Very, very lucky. I’m not trying that again any time soon.

I think that covers most of the weekend. Today, I have a trip in the works to Wan Chai to get my Vietnamese visa, but first I’m going to English Corner where there is such a thing as a free lunch.

I guess a full-length bloviation on Macau won’t be coming any time soon. Brief notes, instead, follow:

I suffered four passport stamps for the journey, including a re-stamping of the half-page Hong Kong student residency stamp. I hope that doesn’t happen every time I come back in but I think it does. Ouch.

It was very cool to see mosaic sidewalks and Portuguese signage everywhere. The Macanese may be better than Hong Kong people at making sure the second-language version is available, though fewer actually speak Portuguese. This may not be as cool if you não fala Português, but it was cool for me.

Prices are quite touristy, at least on the Peninsula, even leaving aside the inconvenience of Patacas (pegged slightly under the HKD but virtually unconvertible outside of the MSAR). Egg tarts for 6 MOP? Come on.

Stanley Ho’s ailing monopoly even owns the ferry terminal. That’s pathetic. There’s a post on dysfunctional SAR politics (never mind the US, I don’t even want to read the news now) coming some time.

Many colonial buildings were painted in garish colors. Tourist guides seem to think this is a feature. I am unconvinced.

The Portuguese and Brazilian food selection is very good, though not very well priced (again).

I really didn’t get much out of the visit. I’ve heard that the islands (well, they were islands until being connected by the “Cotai” reclamation) of Taipa and Coloane are beautiful but I didn’t have the time or motivation to see them. If they are they might balance out the peninsula.

Zhuhai could be cool—I may never know since I’d have to burn a PRC visa entry to find out. Maybe as part of a longer Southern Mainland trip.

If you like to gamble I guess you could have a good time—I didn’t even look as I didn’t feel like shelling out for a locker to hold my camera and bag.

I’ve still not been bitten by the blogging bug, probably because the mosquitos, spiders, and other local fauna have crowded it out of the picture. However, to see what wasn’t crowded out of the picture, head for my photo page and take a look at the small slice of Peninsular Macau I visited.