There are so many cafes around our hotel we’ve yet to visit one twice. . Today we ate at The Brunch Club and Supper. A bit of a questionable name, but worked out okay. Food here comes out like a Chinese restaurant at home. It comes out when it’s cooked, not as a table. I had eggs benedict and it came out fast, Kris’ hash took 20 minutes. It’s not all bad, I got to sample hers and she mine. And in fairness, they warned us that the hash would take longer. It’s just how food is done in China, it’s been the same all over. We’ve taken bets to see what dish will come up first!
We took the MTR down to the ferry dock and then the high speed catamaran to Macau. It takes 75 minutes and you have to clear customs. Hong Kong, Macau and China mainland are one country but there must be some very complex agreements in place for border control. It may be all one country but only sorta. We needed a visa for China, but not for Macau or Hong Kong. But because we cleared into Macau and back to Hong Kong we now have two automatic 90 day visas and two landing cards for Hong Kong. Whatever, I’m here and they’ll let us stay for a couple more days. The customs folks at the airport can figure out which piece of paper they want to use when we leave.
Macau was a Portuguese colony at one point and signs are both in Chinese (I can’t read it so I don’t know if it’s Cantonese or Mandarin) and Portuguese. Only then sometimes English. Our Spanish comes in handy all over the place, as we can figure out the written Portuguese! Now Macau is referred to as “The Las Vegas of Asia”.
We visited the old part of town first. St Dominic’s church became a repository of Catholic relics when Portugal had some issues in the 1800’s. A lot of stuff was shipped over for storage and safe keeping. Now it’s a museum of sorts.
Being Saturday, the streets were super busy and the local tourist thing to buy is pork, boar, and beef jerkies and shortbread cookies. Jerky and bakery shops (it’s the same store all the time???) were everywhere and everyone was buying. There are a lot of Chinese tourists here and they like that stuff in a big way.
The above photo is of St Paul’s ruin and you can see how many people were about. Take the same number of people and make the actual road about half as wide. Oh and add in 38 Celsius and ~80% humidity. We drank lots of water again today.
St. Paul’s ruin is cool to see, it’s just a facade that is left, as the original church was destroyed by a fire.
From the old town we walked to the casino area because we could see some. But just like in Vegas, just because you can see it, doesn’t mean you are close. We know this, but decided to walk anyway. Plus the buses were crazy full and we couldn’t find a place to cross the street. Anyway, the Wynn is about 1/4 Vegas scale but looks the same. Somehow it doesn’t look as gaudy as the Las Vegas hotel.
There are a few Chinese casinos too, one being Star World (boring looking building) and the more interesting Grand Lisboa. It is made up of about 5 different buildings, the tower below is the Grand Lisbon and the tallest around.
There is also a very small (by Vegas standards) MGM hotel.
We ate lunch at 5pm at the MGM. It was also dinner, it was so late. It really was too hot to eat anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many Dior, Prada, Rolex, Omega, Cartier, Fendi and other brands I probably should be impressed by in one place. There were I think 3 different Rolex locations and at least 2 Cartier in one mall. Not at lot of shoppers mind you but nice bathrooms to pee in!
After we were full we headed back to Hong Kong on the ferry, stopped for ice cream and called it a day. Tomorrow we head back over to the Kowloon side to visit one more temple and do some hiking in Kam Shan Park.