Macau is.... interesting.

Okay I gotta admit, I'm getting over my initial misgivings about Macau. Man, the last 36 hours have been, er, fun.

Lemme start from the start (after the Hong Kong arrival). Linds and I finally tracked down her luggage from the Lost and Found at HK airport (thank you very much, United... Lost and Found is where they put misplaced luggage, useless ding-dongs). And boy, did Linds have some luggage! It wasn't that big a deal, coz we had trolleys :-) which you're not allowed to take on the train :-( which we needed to take in order to catch the ferry.

(one too many "which"s in that sentence... poor SNU students are gonna be screwed...)

Ok, so that was all cool, except we had to drag all 100kgs of luggage a looong way to get to the goddang ferry. And of course, English-speaking peoples were non-existent, esp. as far as customer services reps were concerned. But we managed to get onto the ferry (Macau has separate immigration requirements to HK) and get into Macau with approx. one brazillion other peoples... man I never seen so many people in one immigration queue man, made me wanna pack my bags and head back to cozy ol' Whangaz inna flash!

Soooo, anyhow, off the ferry and into another goddang queue for a taxi, with all our freakin' luggage. The taxi-dude pulls up, and man, do we pack his car full of our crap. I mean, there was luggage stickin' outta the window, luggage stickin' outta the boot, luggage pokin' outta the exhaust... let's just say that the driver wasn't amused (he couldn't speak English, but he didn't need to, lolz0r)...

Well at least he managed to get us to the hotel without a) crashing the cab; b) kicking us outta the cab; or c) disposing of our bodies in the Macau Harbour after stripping us of cash (and our bodies would have dissolved into Macau Harbour goodness...). Fortunately, the hotel had upgraded us to an Executive suite (i.e. rats were only on the menu instead of in the shower with you), which was a welcome reward for the pain of the morning. The only problem with the Executive suite was that it was on a higher floor than normal, so we got a better view of the hell-hole that is Macau. I will post a photo here for your viewing pleasure, once I download it off my camera.

After havin' a shower and getting changed, Linds and I decided to check out the town. So we walked up the street from the hotel, decided that if we continued, mugging and certain death would be our fate. Back to the hotel then for directions to a decent restaurant... and the answer was to head down the street, turn left, and keep on going until we found a restaurant that served actual food.

Fifteen minutes later, and we hadn't found a restaurant - instead we had found a little hole-in-the-wall where a bunch of little kiddies were drinking milk from Coke bottles. A good sign if ever there was one. It turned out to be a food place after all. Remember earlier when I said that English-speakers were rare around here? Try non-existent, now. So the lady behind the counter shows us some noodles. Thumbs up to that. Then she pulls out a ladle with what appeared to be lumps of rubber stirred into sump oil. We declined that. The lady then pulled out some sad-looking won-tons from the fridge. Thumbs up.

And holy flang, it was a good lunch! Best I've had so far since arriving, anyhow. We headed back to the hotel afterwards and crashed, man... haven't slept like that since last Friday's Policy and Monitoring meeting.

Hey if you're still reading this thing, great! If not, I don't blame you. How the heck am I saying so much about so little?

Fast-forward to the next day, and Linds and I are wandering around Macau. It turns out that the hotel (Best Western, if you wanted to know) is in a shady part of town, and the rest of Macau ain't that bad! We spotted a Portuguese restaurant along the way too, so we marked that for lunch. We wandered all over the place, and took a bunch of photos (again, please stay on hold while I get them uploaded...). The casinos here are literally out of this world. It appears the Death Star wasn't destroyed by Rebel X-wings - it crash-landed on Macau, and someone enterprisingly turned it into a casino.

I was getting hungry now. So we backtracked to the Portuguese restaurant, which turned out to be a classy affair. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the noodles and won-tons the previous day were $24 MOP, which is about $4 NZD. Today's lunch was $220 MOP, about $40 NZD, and it sucked the big one. In fact, it caused my stomach to be upset, and I, in turn (cover your ears, kiddies), caused the hotel lobby toilet to block and overflow, lolz0r. I told reception someone else had done it...

Anyhow, I promise to be more succinct in my next post. Apologies for the long read!

Pies out.

Pies tip of the day: Don't come to Macau. If you do, then you are an idiot, or a sadomasochist. Or both.