Remainder of St. Paul's Catholic Church in Macau
Andy and I had a wonderful trip to Macau this past weekend to celebrate our sixth wedding anniversary. We arrived in Macau late in the evening and I was surprised that we had to fill out the standard immigration (visa) and customs forms even though Macau is now a part of China. Apparently, like Hong Kong, China is “leaving it alone for 50 years” thus the need for the documentation. We took a cab to our hotel and crossed a large body of water that seemed to have numerous bridges straddling it. The lights and buildings reflecting on water looked really magical at night.
After a semi-uneventful cab ride, we arrived at the Hotel Lisboa. The cars drive on the opposite side of the road in Macau and we found the driving to be much more ‘polite’ than in mainland China. It was a nice change. Our hotel was one of the more famous Chinese-owned hotels owned by Stanley Ho, who owns at least 16 hotels in Macau. He has competition now since the government has opened it up for foreign competition and the Sands, the Wynn, the MGM and the Venetian are all building (or have built) large hotel/casinos in Macau. Everyone is claiming Macau is the next Vegas, but we felt it still has a long way to go to reach the craziness of Vegas. Oddly enough, at least according to something Andy read, it is already bringing in more money than Vegas though and 80% of the money comes from high rollers.
Anyway, so we arrived at the Hotel Lisboa, checked in and settled into our room briefly before going in search of food. We hoped that one of the hotel’s restaurants was still open because we were starving and thankfully we were in luck because the Chinese restaurant with the Wine Spectator recognized wine list was open until 10:30. We walked into the restaurant to find a fifties style band with a dance floor of Chinese people ballroom dancing. The dancers were not novices. It was clear that they were all very experienced dancers as they all seemed to know exactly the dance and moves to do for each song that was played. It was amazing. Between bites of our fried rice and dim sum, we stared in awe. This one woman was especially worthy of staring as she danced very passionately with herself and would get really close to a building beam that was covered with mirrors and would perform these elaborate dance moves while staring at herself. While she was entertaining from a “one of these kids is not like the other” perspective, the rest of the people were entertaining from a being fabulous dancers perspective. We were in awe. It was almost like we were in the Twilight Zone and it was especially curious because I had just commented to Andy last week that it is sad that people don’t “go dancing” anymore. On our way back to the room after dinner, we walked through the hotel casino and found it full of games we had never played before. The big favorite was Baccarat.
We slept in on Saturday and then decided to go exploring. We just started walking and found ourself in a completely deserted part of town that had a Lebanese restaurant and a statue of a lady/god of some sort on the water. Every street we were one had literally between 50 – 100 scooters but yet no people were to be seen. We were starting to think that Macau was quite strange. Finally, we found the Sands Hotel and entered the casino. Suddenly we found all of the people. I could not even venture to guess how many tables were in that casino, but there were at least four large floors of casino and I would guess that at least 70% of them were Baccarat. We should have studied up on the game before the trip, but since we hadn’t, we decided to sit down at a Roulette table since it was the only game we knew how to play. We plopped down 500 Macau dollars and tried a few different strategies that ultimately ended in the loss of the money. I hate Roulette because that is what always seems to happen to me. This renewed my love for Texas Hold’em but after asking around, it seems the only poker game played in Macau is Caribbean Stud. Booo!
Not wanting to miss out on the cultural part of the city, we left the Sands and headed to St. Paul’s ruins (see picture above) and were lucky that a museum of Macau was a little bit further up the hill from the ruins. The museum started out in an entirely fascinating manner with one side of a hallway showing the history of various things in China and on the on the other side of the hallway, the history of the each thing was shown for Portugal. So for example, a history of Chinese religion was shown on the right hand side of the hall and on the left hand side, a history of religion in Portugal was described. I think this was so fascinating to me because I am constantly confronted by the stark differences between eastern and western cultures, and this helped explain why everything seems to be so drastically different. As far as the history of Macau goes, the Portuguese were quite the explorers and ended up in Macau. At first the Chinese kicked them out and then at some point they were allowed to stay and Macau became a Portuguese colony. Andy read somewhere that the Chinese offered to allow them to stay if they could get rid of the pirates. This factoid was not in the museum so belief of its authenticity is up to the reader.
After the museum, we headed down the hill back towards our hotel, but I was sidetracked by some awesome stores. They actually had goods that are made in Macau for sale and they happened to be brands such as Roxy and other American clothes for export. Additionally, I found a very cheap store selling cashmere. How could I resist? After being reminded that it was OUR anniversary and Andy hates shopping, we went back to the hotel to change for dinner.
I got all dressed up for dinner and even brought my new fancy purse that I bought in Mexico. Oh and I was wearing my new patent leather high-heels that I had bought at the shoe store I failed to mention I shopped at as well. We took a cab over to Coloane island to eat at a Portuguese restaurant called Fernando’s I had seen in the travel guide magazine in the hotel. When we got out of the cab and I had to walk over a dog (that was so sound asleep I could have sworn he was dead) to get into the restaurant, we realized we were WAY over dressed. Who knew? Embarrassed about my improper attire, I avoided eye contact with the other restaurant patrons as we headed to the back area to look for a table. The dinner and wine both turned out to be great and we ended up sharing a cab back to Macau island with a couple from Australia who thought our “strong American accents” were so cute. The woman (who was a little bit drunk mind you) was surprised that our accents were still so strong after living in Shanghai for six months. Hmm, I wasn’t aware that my English was supposed to be changing while I live in China.
To cap off the already eventful day, Andy insisted that we get a massage. We went to the hotel spa and they gleefully welcomed Andy but didn’t even have a changing room for me…a little suspicious. While Andy went to the spa, a women walked me down three flights of stairs littered with vacant rooms on either side of the staircase all the way down. Once we arrived at some random room in the bowels of the hotel, she gave me a shirt, some shorts and a wad of cotton. I changed into the shorts and shirt and ignored the cotton. About 15 minutes later, Andy came down in a matching outfit and said in the funniest, desperate voice when he saw me, “Oh, Thank God!” Throughout the massage, the two girls kept referring to us as “friends” even after I said that we were married. I can only imagine who their “normal” clientele is. Apparently a lot of Chinese government men frequent Macau.
Sunday was slept in again, then took a cab to another island called Taipa where they were having a Sunday market. I did a bit of shopping and then we walked around Taipa a bit. This was a great opportunity to see the mixture of Portuguese and Chinese influences in the community. It really was neat! I so wanted to take a picture of this cool Chinese medicine shop I found but the woman wouldn’t let me. It was exactly like the one the had modeled in the museum.
Later, we took a cab to the Fisherman’s Wharf and had lunch and enjoyed our final couple hours in Macau. Before we picked up our bags that were being guarded by concierge at the Hotel Lisboa, we stopped by the Wynn again, which we had visited the day before and looked at the designer stores (seriously, can you image paying $3000 for a purse that you can buy at the fake market for $10) and I bought a Macau Starbucks mug.
Finally, we headed back to the airport and after a delayed flight made it back to Shanghai late Sunday night.
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