HK Round 2 - Day 5

Today I met with my friend, Clarence, for lunch and he took me to a local spot to get some cheap good eats. After lunch we went to a famous local bakery where I had the most buttery dan tats (egg custards).

After walking around the IFC mall for a bit, I decided to take a day trip to Macau, a UNESCO site. It's about a 1 hour ferry ride to Macau and there are sizable remnants of the Portuguese influence. The captions on museum plaques are in Chinese, Portuguese, and English. I could get around HK rather easily because most of the people spoke a little English and when I went to some of the remote areas I could navigate in Mandarin. However, that was not the case in Macau as everyone spoke Cantonese and no English or Mandarin. My mandarin wasn't as helpful here as it was in HK.

Macau is the most densely populated region in the world and it was apparent in the hoards of people everywhere that I went. I visited two sections – the first being the historical area of Macau and the second being the casino area. The historical areas had a distinct European architecture and feel with the Portuguese style buildings and street names. I walked around the center for a couple hours and made my way up a steep hill to the top where there was a fort and a large museum in the fort. On the way up the huge hill it was extremely muggy and it felt like I was walking through a rain cloud so it wasn’t surprising that on the way out I got caught in a monsoon and stood under a shop awning for about an hour while I waited for the rains to dissipate. Then I walked around the casino area for a bit before heading home. The casinos in Macau were huge with an emphasis on hard core gambling. Other than gambling, there was little else to do for entertainment unlike Vegas where there are mini golf course, theme parks, local tours, street foods, clubs, gaudy reconstruction of other cities like Paris or New York, etc.

Hong Kong Round 2 - Day 5