Revisiting Macau

The traveling nurse is back. After months of floods, holidays, exams, work and trainings, we've come to the special part of the year where I'll be bombarding you reluctant readers with nauseating excitement for future trips complete with too detailed stories and amateur snapshots of random places from our last vacation. Here we go.

Spent a day in Macau last year and it's just now that I'm regretting that I did not get to do a lengthy post about our stay there. I'm not pointing fingers but it really was Ondoy's fault. Just two weeks after our arrival from Hong Kong, he decided to gleefully shower the metropolis with rain and destruction. I bet you know what happened next.

We took a ferry from Hong Kong to Macau and participated in a day tour of the city. Our first stop was the Macau Tower. Took pictures and watched bungee jumpers jump off the building. Took more pictures. Honestly, I would not dare travel without a camera.

Our next stop was far from the city and it involves a Buddhist Temple and a Portugese Church. Sorry for religion fanatics but those simply weren't the best part of the tour for us. They were simply not interesting enough. We also went to a riverside place with ethnic looking houses on the bay and a sort of commercial area with a number of restaurants and shops. Those stopovers made me realize that Macau's tourism strength is quite reliant on their casinos and extravagant hotels.

Thankfully, the day just got better with our stopover at Museu de Macau and  Ruins of St. Paul. We rushed through the first part because we were itching to get out of the museum and head on to the great architectural feat that is the church's facade. There is literally nothing inside it except open space, not even a roof, but for some reason, the front stood strong despite the decades of typhoons and there we marveled at an ancient masterpiece.

The thing I certainly did not appreciate about the day tour is the unbelievable time constraint that we were put under. Only 45 minutes to enjoy this, 20 minutes there. It's like touring ala The Amazing Race. Except  it wasn't a competition and there wasn't a million dollars at the end of the line.

Another was the Filipino-owned souvenir shop near the Ruins. At first we were ecstatic to see a face with the same features as ours. We even conversed in Tagalog. But when the time came that we were buying stuff from their store together with the other tourist from our group, they blatantly ignored our inquiries on prices and T-shirt sizes and focused their attention on the ones from Malaysia and Thailand. Not only were we majorly disappointed with their service but felt rather betrayed by our own race.

The last part of the tour was in the heart of the metropolis. We toured the inside of Casino Lisboa and even got a complementary membership card, sort of. Honestly, I don't know what it was for, just that it's shiny and it's pretty cool to find inside a wallet.

We were introduced to the lifestyle of the filthy rich which I must admit is pretty sparkly and full of 24-carat gold floors, but then I had realized that we we were pretty well-off enough to begin with, compared to the thousands of Filipinos making up the C and D class of the demographic. And that is definitely something to be thankful of.

So before this post start to become a weird lovechild of travel and societal injustices, let me wrap this up by reiterating my goal ,which is to step foot in all 7 continents of the world. (Okay, so maybe except Antartica). After all, the world is too small to let a few hundred miles get in the way of absolute world domination. In a Lonely Planet-ish kind of way, at least.