Saturday August 12th

Well, this trip to Macau didn’t start very well. We got up too late, had to pack too much… And so we had to run to get our bus at 8h55. Andries took a head start (yes, he is faster than me) to stop the bus, I tried to catch up with him but tripped over a curb. Autch. But the bus waited and 5 minutes later we were heading to Macau. Because the trip was longer then to Hong Kong, the bus stopped at a wayside restaurant. I wanted to go the toilet, but I postponed it until Macau when I saw the toilets. Maybe the people who went to China before can remember the wayside restaurant toilets… it’s really disgusting… Most of them are not flushed, the smell is incredible, and there is dirty paper everywhere. Back on the road we stood in a traffic-jam for a while due to an accident with a small truck. Apparently he had a blowout by which he lost his load. If you zoom in on the picture, you can see a Puratos box (with Bread Improver S500, we are already geeks on that field).

We crossed the boarder in Zhuhai, a nice city along the coast, with a coast line very similar to Spain or the South of France.

At Zhuhai, the bus left us in an underground parking, and we tried to follow our fellow passengers, but we lost them quickly. The control posts at the border were no problem, we were already experienced :) An important advice: never forget to bring your own ball point, otherwise you can start asking around (like us) and that’s not easy with only Chinese speaking people around you. Luckily we were in the “Foreigners Lane” and the chance of catching English speaking people there is much higher. And yes, we got again new stamps on our passports! The one in Macau are blue and not red (as the Chinese and Hong Kong’s). We already collected more then 10 stamps. But the happiness about our new blue stamps quickly turned into worries, when we couldn’t find our bus behind the border. We searched the whole border area: the bus stations under the ground, the own on the left, the one on the right… We went to the Information Desk, but they couldn’t help us out. Then we considered taking a taxi, but the row of waiting people was already 100 meters long. Not an option. So we went back to one of the bus stations, we showed them our tickets and they pointed out a new (smaller) bus for us. Okay… With no clue where we were going, we just stepped on the bus.

At the Macau border:

On the bus I was sitting next to a student (who could speak English) and I asked her if she knew where the bus stopped. Well, it was certainly going in the right direction: the town center. She declared me crazy, not knowing where this bus was going :) At different stops, everybody was getting of the bus, until only a Chinese man and we were left. He was very friendly and asked were we wanted to get off. We just wanted to go to the Senado Square, the center of the old city and he assisted us from the bus stop to there. Really, Chinese people are so friendly, every time we are stunned by them being so helpful.

On the Senado Square, we went to the tourist office to gather some information. Afterwards we had lunch and decided to do the first part of a tour along all the World Heritage of Macau. It was a really beautiful walk along the very European style churches and buildings. You know, Macau has more churches per square kilometer than the Vatican!

Here are some sights of Macau:

Cathedral and the square around it:

St. Dominic’s Church:

Senado Square:

Leal Senado Building:

Holy House of Mercy:

St. Augustine’s Church and Square:

Sir Robert Ho Tung Library:

St. Lawrence church:

Moorish Barracks:

A-Ma temple:

And along the Gate of Understanding and a beautiful view over the surrounding islands, this tour led us to the Macau Tower, one of the highest in the world.

Gate of Understanding on the right, brigde to Taipa on the left:

We didn’t actually visited the tower (because we wanted to do something special there tomorrow), we only visited the exhibition center next to the tower. Inside we had a drink in the Café on 4 where they had a special special:

From there we took a taxi to the hotel, which was actually situated on Taipa island, the island next to Macau. We had to get in line to wait for a taxi, but the view when we were driving over one of the bridges in between Macau and Taipa was priceless. In the hotel, a pleasant surprise awaited us. We booked a standard room (the cheapest, we are only students) but because they were all full, we got: a suite! Andries didn’t believed it at first, but we had a suite. You know, a huge room with three parts: the living room with leather seats a minibar and TV and then the sleeping room with beds and a second TV and another seat and then the bath room with bath and shower. It was almost as big as our apartment! Hallelujah, this was nice! After overcoming the excitement about the room, excuse me, suite, we decided to take a dive in the swimming pool. Apparently nobody shared our idea, so we had a private swimming pool for us. The rich life…

Then we went for food: Pizzahut. The Pizzahut’s in Hong Kong are very different from those in China and Europe, because in Hong Kong they are really luxurious. The food is not more expensive then in China but you just have more choices. After a good meal, we went gambling! A suite, a private swimming pool and good food: like real rich people we entered the casino area! Maybe this could be our lucky day! We started with Hotel Lisboa, the most famous one in Macau. While we were just wondering around in the casino we met two Mexicans: Roberto and Diana. We hanged out with them for the rest of the evening, chatting about China and Europe and Mexico… It was really nice. We also gambled, we had a gambling budget for the weekend of 100 RMB (= 10 euros). Today we already spent half of it on the slots machines (the rest of the games were to difficult to understand in such a short period of time) :) Although we’ve won sometimes, in the end all our money was gone. The highest sum we won was around 30 RMB. But we had a fun night, wandering around bars and casinos. It was late when we arrived back at our suite and we had no trouble with falling asleep.