Macau, the Asian las Vegas

Macau, like Hong Kong, is theoretically Chinese but not really... But as I kept on repeating the entire WE, there are a lot of Chinese people there!


In summary, it's not really like china because rules are much more flexible, no need for a visa prior to traveling but the gambling industry mainly serve Chinese people coming either from HK or main land. As European tourist, we felt very isolated! (English is not widely spoken...)

Macau is formed of Macau peninsula (who would have guessed...), and the islands of Taipa and Coloane. These last 2 are now pretty much a single island connected by the wonders of land reclamation which is also the new casino centre: Cotai strip, where our hotel was.

When we arrived, we couldn't find the hotel reception, finding the casino was not difficult, but who would have thought that the reception was stuck in between 2 casinos?

Food was the highlight of the WE for me (I wish that was the case everywhere else in asia...) the Portuguese heritage brought us octopus salads, fried chorizo, garlic gambas and pasteis de nata and the fusion cuisine of Macau added afrikan chicken, vanilla soufle and a few other thinks. Not to forget we were in southern china, we added a Cantonese fried rice on Sunday lunch time for good measure.

The weekend was divided in between finding the remains of Portuguese colonization, that includes lots of churches in the city centre but also some quiet market squares on the south of Coloane island.

And exploring the casinos trying to understand the rules of some games and deciding which one was the most suitable for spending our money

Baccarat seems to be a Chinese favorite but we still have no idea what are the rules or even what's the goal! Black jack seems by far the easiest but the insurance part completely escaped us...

We finally decided to spend the remaining of the WE money in the Pacific casino, the Venitian was too big, the Himalaya too cold ;-), the Lisboa too smoky, to be really honest, the Pacific just had the lowest entry bet for Blackjack...

Call me cheap but 200 HK$ (20€) already seems excessive to me!