Macau

I guess I'm going to aim for monthly reports! February has flown by, I really don't know where the time has gone...my last exam is April 22nd, so I'm already halfway through! Really? I would say February has been pretty intense with activity. I went to Macau for Valentine's weekend with Jenny, Sabrina, and Maibritt. It's only an hour ferry ride away. We stayed at the Venetian, which I heard has the most square footage of any building in the world? Or something like that. And to explain, Macau is basically the Las Vegas of the east. There are tons of new hotels being constructed, but they already have tons of casinos, such as the Wynn, Sofitel 16, Grand Lisboa, etc. The Venetian is a little further out, but you could spend days in there shopping! Haha. Right when we got to the hotel we were able to check in, and then we took a taxi to St. Paul's Cathedral Ruins. Macau used to be a Portuguese colony, so it was really cool to see European style buildings and streets in an Asian city. It was a nice area with a fortress, tons of almond cookie shops, and Portuguese egg tarts, so we had a sweet lunch there. You could really tell it was all tourists though, so we left around 3pm to head back to the hotel. We got ready for dinner and the Cirque du Soleil show, Zaia.

We took a taxi to a village to have dinner. Everyone stared at us since we were so overdressed and the restaurants there definitely weren't high class, but I was excited about tasting some Asian food with a Portuguese flair! The restaurant we wanted to go to didn't open until 6, and we were half an hour early so we walked around...not much to see, went back to hte restaurant and hovered outside waiting for it to open. A woman was standing inside...not doing anything, so I tried to get her attention, but it didn't work. About 5 minutes til 6, a guy goes in, and it turns out they were fully booked for the night, so we waited for nothing :( Needless to say, we were bitter towards the woman that basically watched us for half an hour. So we went to another restaurant the concierge had suggested called Dumbo. And it actually had a picture of dumbo the flying elephant outside so I was pretty skeptical. But we go upstairs and it turns out to be a nice place with a number of customers already. We ordered the local specialties, such as African Chicken and Fried Fishballs (balls made out of fish..just to clarify). Then we went to another place and got the Sawdust cake, it was really fluffy and whipped with yummy crushed biscuit, making the sawdust part of the cake. Went back to the hotel and watched Zaia. It was amaaaaazing, as to be expected from a Cirque du Soleil show. Before the show I noticed a guy was walking up the aisle and I did a double-take since I realized he was NOT wearing normal clothes. Turns out it was one of the performers from the show and he gave us roses! Ahhhh Romeo!

After the show we went to the casino, I only played slots and lost all my money since I had no idea what I was doing and the instructions were in Chinese. Instead, I lived vicariously through Jenny who played War, and another game called Sic...something. It was really cool walking around the casino, but there were a lot of tourists there, so there weren't many high stakes games going on.

The next morning we had a delicious breakfast buffet at the hotel. There was so much good fruit, scrambled eggs, chicken sausage..mmmmm. I've been missing a hearty breakfast, so I was pretty excited when I saw the HUGE buffet line. Afterwards we spent the whole morning shopping around the Venetian Canal Shoppes, and left around 1pm. We all had work to do :( But it was a lovely Valentine's weekend!

Coming up next, my trip to Shenzhen and the island of Tap Mun!