Macao

We had a quick girls' weekend to Macao. An hour on the ferry boat across the China Sea is Macao, an old Portuguese colony and the last colony in Asia to be given back to China. You'd think that this means it still has some vestiges of colonial Portuguese, nope. The rate of development in China is just too fast for anything historical, be in Iberian or Confuscian, to survive. Macao has become the Las Vegas of Asia....There's a Venetian, an MGM Grand, a Sands, a Winn and about a thousand other big Vegas casinos here, plus dozens more in the works. The whole city looks like a construction site, with people working round he clock to put up new casinos and hotels. They say it will be bigger that Vegas in 5 years, and I believe it, with the flood of China's new middle class coming in to squander away their family fortunes...There are some wealthy people from Hong Kong, Singapore, all over, there too, real high rollers. We found a lovely little Portuguese pension to stay in, far away from the glitzy hotels. It felt like being in Portugual, except that the staff spoke Chinese...weird! Then we took a taxi out to the outskirts of town and ate at a great little Portuguese restaurant in the middle of nowhere. They had pitchers of sangria, and roast suckling pig and roast chicken on top of greasy french fries...to die for! We binged. It was fabulous....Then we went to the Winn to do some gambling. But the slot machines in Asia are so complicated, you have to have a Phd in Math to figure them out. Still, I won 50 HK dollars...or about 2 USD, enough to pay for the cab ride home!