Hong Kong

After my trip from Macau I was exhausted and as soon as I checked into my hotel, I fell asleep. Once I finally woke up, I surveyed my surroundings to figure out where I actually was and decided to go check out the country.

First of all, I've never seen so much crammed into such a small place. Everywhere you looked you could see reflections of this. Even my hotel, which was the best one they had (top floor, corner) was tiny! It was definitely just a place to sleep and nothing else. Walking around the city, I got the impression that people tend to spend their time outside. There were tons of people everywhere.

The city itself I didn't find that impressive. There were buildings, buildings and more buildings. It is a city that has been built up instead of out due to geographical constraints I tried to take some pictures of the scenery, but they all turned out the same. There are two things to note in this picture. 1) Double decker buses, it goes with the saving space theme of the city. and 2) they drive on the wrong side of the road. It is a former English colony and the influence is still present. Unlike mainland China, people here actually spoke English which made things much easier for me even though I was expecting to hear nothing but Cantonese. Even the street names reflected this. Causeway bay, Russell road, etc. These are not typical Chinese names.

After exploring a while, I came across a meat market. This is not the same thing as we would expect in Canada, they actually sold meat. The funny thing was, it was all sold outside on hooks. No refrigeration, insulation or anything of the sort. I had to take a picture. I'd like to dedicate this photo to my vegetarian sister Tara. I could tell the meat was fresh, because out of the seafood, half of the fish were still flopping around. Another trick that I learned when I talked to someone was that when choosing your meat, take the one with the most flies. This is the freshest. If there are no flies on the meat, then it is past its prime.

Unfortunately I didn't get to Mount Victoria and I didn't get to take the starlight ferry as I didn't have much time in Hong Kong. I headed to the airport that this point. I loved the airport and it was probably my favorite part of Hong Kong. It is right between the two runways and there are tons of windows so you can watch aircraft taking off and landing. Being the airport it is, there are also a ton of large aircraft to check out. I looked and didn't see any A380s. Too bad!

Well that is the end of my trip to China. Two months was a long time and I am glad to be home. I will be heading to Moscow in Russia for a week at the end of March. I'll continue my blog then.

Che Che!

Macau

I finished my last night shift in China and decided to go to Macau right afterwards before I left to come back home to Canada. To get to Macau was easy, I just had to take a taxi to the underground market and then walk across a bridge and through a few checkpoints.

Macau is essentially the Las Vegas of China. It is similar to Hong Kong in that it is a foreign colony that has been recently handed back to the Chinese government but isn't integrated into China yet. It was a Portuguese colony and everywhere you look you see things written in both Chinese and Portuguese. The architecture looks somewhat Spanish and there are other races there other than just Asians. Many of the people look like they are part Asian, part Portuguese.

When I got to the other side of the border, there were a ton of free buses to the various casinos. The first place I went was the Venetian. This is supposedly the second largest building in the world (sq ft wise). I left my bags with the concierge and tried my luck at the tables. Now I am not too familiar with the value of the Hong Kong dollar which is used there, and it was my first time in a casino, but it seemed like a high rolling place. I was expecting to spend around $20CAD which is a bit less than $200 HKD while I was there, but then found out that the minimum bet at any table was $200 HKD. Anyways I played the minimum bet for a little while and by the end of my stint on the roulette table, I had won just over $1000 HKD.

While I was playing roulette, two guys came up behind me and each placed $5000 HKD on the table. They placed their chips. One guy lost it all in one round and the other guy increased his amount ten-fold. Not bad!

I walked around after that to explore the building and it was huge. The thing which I thought was the coolest, and maybe this is just the engineer in me, but they had spiral escalators! I can't even imagine the design that was required for that.

After that, I figured that the best public transportation to get around Macau was the free hotel buses. So I grabbed my bags, headed back to the border and then took the MGM Grand hotel bus. The MGM was nice, but exactly the same as the Venetian. There were big halls and lots of card tables. The minimum bet here was $50 HKD so I guess the Venetian was a little crazy.

After this I went exploring a little more. There were more casinos and stores that were expensive enough that they didn't need price tags. If you have to ask, you can't afford it. Sorry, Katie, I didn't get you anything from the Gucci, Prada, or Mont Blanc shops. In the photo on the left, you can see the Wynn hotel and the MGM grand is in the backround.

The last place I went to see was the Grand Lisbon which is the tallest building in Macau. I have two pictures of it below. One was taken from the base of the building and the other was taken from the van on our drive home from work. We literally had to drive around Macau to get to work every day. I couldn't go earlier because I didn't have the multiple entry Chinese visa.

By around 4 o'clock I had been awake for 24 hours and was exhausted. I headed to the ferry and sailed to Hong Kong.