Thursday, September 19, 2013

A Sunday in the City of Dreams


"LADY! YOU SEE THIS?? YOU CANNO BE HERE! YOU CANNO BE HERE THIS NO VALID!!"

Oh shit.  It's 9:30 on a Sunday.  I was on my way to Macau to activate my visa, which unbeknownst to me expired in July.  It's mid September.  This little slip up makes the immigration officer in front of me very angry. I've heard of various horror stories of people messing up their visas and being deported. I immediately get anxious.  Images of me being handcuffed and thrown on a plane without out any of my belongings pops into my head.  Another officer walks towards me and motions for me to follow him to a stark white room.  I'm pretty sure like in Homeland  I'm about to get water boarded for information on US secrets.  

The officer smiles warmly at me, confusing me thoroughly. (This is obviously the good cop in the good cop/bad cop duet)  He calmly asks what went wrong and I plead ignorance and flash him a pearly white smile.  He slaps me with fine, a visa extension, another warm smile and sends me on my way to Macau.  (I'm kind of disappointed that wasn't more of a challenge.)

Macau is a hop skip and a  jump away from Hong Kong where the majority of foreigners run off to to activate their visa since in order to do so, one has to leave the country.  It's really well known for it's lap of luxury casinos, high end retail shopping, and density of mainland Chinese population.

Along with being home to a ridiculous amount of casinos, Macau also smells like shit.  The water looks like society took a huge dump in it and there was a super monster fog of pollution hanging over the city.  I'm kind of always joking about China giving me cancer, but in all seriousness, I'm pretty sure staying in Macau past a day would cause the cells in my body to start rapidly malfunctioning.  It wreaks of suckers with money to burn aka-tourists.  I'm starving and I walk a few miles in the hot sun before I come upon the first quality establishments of the day: KFC and McDonalds.  Taking the nutritional high road is difficult, but I walk past them.  My stomach growls at me.
water in Macau

The outskirts of the city have an eerie lack of people walking and bumping into each other on the street, but soon enough I come to realize that everyone is either ballin in a casino, or ballin on a tour bus with fixed empty gazes.  I have no idea where I am going, but according to my map, everything is a tourist destination so I pick a direction and start walking.

My first challenge is the crosswalk itself.  There is one... but it's not controlled by lights and there is steady stream of traffic.  I'm guessing I just have to Thailand that mess and weave in and out of cars??  An old man approaches and scoffs at my timidness.  He steps onto the pavement and like magic, all the cars come to a halt.  I scamper after him.

I'm also getting REAL hot so I duck into the first hotel I see- Encore.  The AC is blasting and it smells like elegance, cigars and money.  I should find a way to bottle that. There is a soft Cuban samba playing over head and a wall of jelly fish behind the reception.  To the right of the reception desk is a Cartier store where women in Gucci are meandering over the treasures. My converse and general attire are starting to make me feel a little under dressed. Images of me in a swank floor length red D&G seducing some sucker for his millions are swirling in my head when I leave the hotel.  A mainlander hawks a loogie on the sidewalk in front of me snapping me back to reality.  Disgusting.

Jelly Fish wall.  I've got to get one of these. 
I follow far behind a huge group of Asian tourists into a non descript building and it pays off.  The casino has these crazy ornate gold depictions of the Chinese Zodiac signs splattered on the ceiling.



After exploring around a bit I realize fancy ceilings are a thing around here.  I probably have a thing or two to learn about casino culture.

The lotus interior
The Galaxy interior
Lion Royalty interior


I see casino after casino after casino blah blah blah, and then I get to a huge building that looks like a lotus. So obviously I go in. Entering this building felt equatable to entering the mother ship.

The mother ship

This time around I went to the tables to take a gander.  It was cool to observe the old men just getting tanked and smoking cigars while carefully calculating their risks.  I didn't even lay any money on the table and I felt like I lost it all and then won it back.   It was exhilarating, I see why people get addicted to playing the game.

Technically I was not supposed to be taking pics, sorry for the shakiness, it was my first spy mission


Coincidentally enough, just as I was giving up hope that Macau was going to produce anything interesting, I ran into an incredible part of town that was an Asian/Portuguese fusion. Not your typical marriage of cultures, but makes sense since it was once a Portuguese colony.  Small windy, tiled roads, wrought iron lining the windows, with dim sum street food, pork buns, and Taiwan tea shops.




 I ate two of the best beef buns I've ever had in my life and it wasn't because I was starving.  It was because they were made of pure awesome.  Perfectly spiced beef in just the right amount of sauce, a few green onions wrapped in a flaky doughy crust.

Street food.  Oh so good.
Somehow I ended up in a garden and on a gondola that cost me roughly 20 cents to take round trip.  The ride wasn't spectacular: the inside of the gondola was like a sauna and the pollution haze was too thick to actually see anything.  But still...it was 20 cents.  Who wouldn't take a gondola ride for 20 cents?

Basically around 3PM I hit a wall and Macau wasn't impressive enough for me to swoon over any longer than I already had.  I hopped back on the ferry and drooled in my sleep on some poor poor tiny Asian with spiky hair and hip hop pants that was too polite to do anything about it.  OH the perks of being a leggy blonde.







  

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