MACAU: WORLD'S LONGEST & LARGEST...

I have officially started my #1 mission for this year: traveling around Asia. I spent Saturday and Sunday in Macau - also know as Las Vegas of Asia. Gambling is illegal everywhere else in China so a loooot of rich Chinese businesmen pop to Macau for a weekend. There was also a lot of pretty girls looking for rich husbands (no, I was not one of them, even though I was sort of hoping to bump into Donald Trump...) The ferry from Hong Kong only takes an hour and HK residents don't need a visa to get there so it's a rather cheap and hassle-free weekend destination. I bet 99.9% of exchange students make at least one trip to Macau during their stay in Hong Kong. I went with 4 other girls: Kirsi (from Finland), Sammie (from Canada), Megha and Lan (both from USA).

Macau has the world's largest and longest. Largest Casino, I mean. And longest Bungee jump. These were our only actual plans for the weekend, besides that we were pretty clueless and unorganised... We didn't even know if Macau had different money than Hong Kong! Turns out that it has but it doesn't matter because most places accept also (or in some cases, only) HK dollars. Macau money also looks weird so we ended up calling it Barbie Money... :P

Saturday evening, after checking into the hotel (which was well nice and only 18e/£12 per person per night) we started looking for some food. Macau, an ex-Portugese colony, is known for its Portugese restaurants, so we wanted to try some of that, in order to have a break from Chinese food. However, this was easier said than done... our hotel was near the city centre, but turns out it was pretty much the centre of where the locals live, not where the casinos/restaurants/tourists/taxis are, so it kinda felt like being in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, after wandering aimlessly for a while, we managed to find an amazing Thai restaurant, and even got to sample some Portugese wine there.

Our next (and main) destination was the Venetian - the world's largest casino. And it was pretty WOW. Difficult to describe - go and see it youself! ;) It is huge, all right, but that's not the coolest part. The whole building itself is amazing, marble and gold and mirrors and pretty things everywhere. Basically a huge palace. And the coolest thing: it has a fake Venice inside. On the second floor. Really. A fake sky, fake Italian buildings, canals and gondolas and everything ...well not quite everything yet, some of it is still under construction. It should be finished in November, I'm definately going back to see it! I mean, the real Venice is sinking and smells bad anyway so this may be as good as it gets ;)

Since we were at a casino, the obvious thing to do was to gamble. None of us are huge gamblers so we mainly focused on the slot machines, which were kinda crap. They had like a gazillion buttons and we had no idea how to play, and if we won we didn't know how and why it happened, so basically they just took our money. It was dead cheap and lot of fun so didn't really matter even if we lost! I wanted to do some actual gambling, so decided to go for Blackjack. I changed some money, obviously expecting to lose it all, but instead I won 700 HKD (70e/£50)! That was soooo cool, I hit blackjack twice in a row (apparently the odds of that happening are veeeery small) and the others on the table started betting with me. I was 'the lucky one' of the table! :) That was so much fun, I wasn't even in it for the money but it was great, I can understand why some peopl get addicted to gambling. Luckily, my friends were sensible and made me stop when I started losing so I didn't lose all my winnings (which is what usually happens....) I bought a round of cocktails for my friends and saved the rest of the money for the Bungee jumping.

We had planned to go clubbing later but when we were about to leave the Casino, it was already 3am so we just headed back to no-mans-land for some late-night snacks and sleep. Hong Kong has amazing clubbing scene anyways, no need to go somewhere else for that!

On Sunday we had planned to go Bungee jumping (none of us had never done it but we were eager to try, after all it is world's longest, who would say no to that...).However, earlier in the morning I got a text from my friend Diana, who was gonna come and join us for the day, that there was no space on the ferries back to HK after 3 pm... That meant we had to go to the ferry terminal first thing on Sunday. The lady who I spoke was extremely confusing: at first there was no space letf, then there was space at 5pm, then there wasn't, then there was space at 4pm if we paid extra... in the end, we managed to get tickets for the 3.50pm ferry, without having to pay the extra (Super Class) fee. At that point, it was 1.30 so we only had time to go back to town to get some food (portugese this time!). We're definately gonna go back for the bungee jump though! It's something I've always wanted to do. Not everyone was so excited about it though: Lan mumbled something about wanting to check the death rates of Bungee jumping... well, Macau is all about gambling, right? ;)

So I had a really good time, but I have to say Macau wasn't as amazing/colorful/shiny/Vegas-like as I had expected, but that was at least partly due to the location of our hotel. On the other hand, a friend of ours said that it's best to go there with no expectations at all and it'll be great, and I see what she means. Also, I guess if you stay in a fancy 5-star hotel and only leave your room to go to the fancy casino next door, you'd have a very different experience.



Right, that was a lot of text about my 24 hours in Macau! Now, other news briefly...


-I have now started my tutoring job. Very fun but challenging. The girl I'm tutoring, Claudia, is very very smart so I actually have to work hard and prepare a lot of material for the lessons. She's really really sweet, and so is her mother so I'm sure it's gonna be great. And they money is quite good :P

-There was a MASSIVE water fight outside my hall a few days ago. It was between two nearby Halls, Ricci Hall and Lady Ho Tung Hall. Years and years ago, the boys from Ricci Hall stole a kong from the in LHT, so now every year they re-enact it. This is how it goes: the Ricci boys come marching, wearing suits, chanting their hall song, trying to get through the wall of LHT girls who are armed with hundreds and hudreds of water balloons. Eventually, a couple of the boys get through, get lifted up on a table and steal the kong. Result: a lot of wet local students, some broken bones and twisted ankles (yes, I'm serious) and a bucnh of hysterical foreigners who've never seen anything like that before.

-It's still pretty hot here, even though it's becoming more bearable. I heard from my Mum that it's getting chilly in Finland, probably not so warm in the UK either... mwahahahaha!

-A lot of fun stuff has been planned for the rest of the week, stay tuned! :)