Going to Macau

After forgetting my passport, which set us back an extra hour, we embarked on the ferry to Macau. The journey was little bit over an hour and went really smooth despite the waves. After getting of the ferry we jumped into a cab and headed to the Macau tower, which is 338 meters high and has a glass tiles that you walk on so you can look all the way down. Since I’m not a great fan of heights it was with very tentative steps that I walked out on one and looked down. Vertigo hit instantly but then it becomes sort of surreal and you forget about it. It was funnier to watch little children jumping up and down on the glass while their parents clapped in delight…loonies!
Got the lift down which went at 100mp and then went into on of the building’s casino’s. Spent all my travel money (just kiddin’) and then headed out to the old town.
Macau used to be a Portuguese colony until 1960’s and the remains of the Portuguese heritage is everywhere from architecture to the street names which are all written in Cantonese and Portuguese. These days the island is big on gambling and the casino’s are everywhere with styles ranging from stylish to downright kitsch. The whole city seems hell-bent on becoming the Asian version of Las Vegas and it doesn’t seems to have too far to go. It gives it all a weird feeling. As soon as you stumble across a casino there lots of shops and full of people. In-between very little at all, almost as if the parts are neglected in favor of the casino’s.
The big savior is the old town where the mixture of Portuguese and Chinese meets in a nice blend. We went up to the Ruinas de Sao Paolo, which used to be hailed as the biggest achievement of Christianity in Asia. The façade looked great but there wasn’t much left of it to be honest. Apparently the building caught fire during a typhoon in 1835 and that façade is almost all that is left of it.
After that we went down trough Largo de Senado and bought ourselves some cookies before checking out the local shopping which was big on antiques and clothes. It was a very nice end to the day before heading back to Hong Kong and some dinner in a great Taiwanese restaurant.