Page 4
Actually one interesting thing we saw at the ferry station leaving Hong Kong was that they had travel agents whose windows were plastered with posters of young, pretty girls along with Chinese writing and lists of prices. I'm not sure what the writing was all about, but based on the look of it, I'd say that the escort service is popular in Macao. We had been told that Macao was like the "Las Vegas of Asia" but I thought they meant just for the gambling.
After dodging the taxi drivers, we jumped into a bus headed down to the Lisboa Casino. We had heard this casino was the best one, and it might be, as it was completely packed. We wandered around the casino and I recognized basically none of the table games. They were all similar to games I've seen in Canada and the U.S., but I wasn't familiar with them. Either way we wen't in a hurry to lose money, so we got out and hopped into a taxi to take us to the Macao tower. We even had to dodge a few "ladies of the evening" waiting in the hallways on the way out. Well actually they didn't bother me, but Jong Soo had a few chasing him down speaking to him in what I assume was Cantonese.
Macao tower is a stand alone strucure, similar to the CN tower that sits on the south end of the island and overlooks all of Macao and the surrounding islands. The viewing area is about 220 metres high, so if it hadn't been foggy, we could have seen a long way. They actually have adventure packages where, for about 200cdn you can climb outside up to the top of the mast or for about fifty, you can walk around the outside on the 3.5 foot wide walkway that surrounds the structure. I would have loved to try, but being mildly afraid of heights, I couldn't even stand on the glass floor looking down without feeling like I was falling. I'm sure that the walk around, in spite of the harness you wear, would have freaked me out enough to leave a little turd in my pants (and I hadn't brought a change of clothes). We took a bunch of pictures and then made our way out got on a bus and headed back towards the ferry station.
We had no real idea where we were going so we just sat on the bus as it drove all over the island. We weren't worried as it's quite small; only about 1/3 the size of Hong Kong Island. We finally admitted that we didn't know where we were on our little tourist maps, so wegot off the bus and hopped into a taxi. We asked the driver to take us to a casino (we tried asking him some other things, but the only word he really understood was "casino"). We ended up at some fancy hotel and went up into the casino to find that the minimum bet for blackjack was $300(50Cdn)\--a little more than I had in mind. So we left and ended up at the Holiday Inn where the casino was much smaller--just one black jack table, but the minimum bets were $200. Once again a lot more than I had in mind, but I reasoned that since I wasn't going to have much chance to gamble again, I might as well splurge in support of the Macao economy. I actually started winning right away, so I was able to play for quite a while. I almost lost the money I had after a run of cold cards when they switched dealers, but after the original dealer came back I went on a run. The rules were a little different, but they weren't hard to pick up. At some point I counted up my money and saw that I was up $1300(220cdn), so I decided to stand up from the table. The woman next to me looked at me like I was an idiot (she was losing) and I still had time, but I figured that, since I was up, I shouldn't push my luck. Jongsoo himself was up about $2000 ($350cdn) when I told him we had better get going to catch the ferry back, so it turned out to be a fairly profitable day trip. ^ ^
We caught a cab to the ferry station, had a little curry-noodle dish,? and got back through Hong Kong Immigration at about 9pm. It's a good thing we had bought our return tickets before we left because there was a huge line up just for stand-by tickets. I was pretty beat tired, but it being our last night in Hong Kong we decided to go back to the Kowloon side in search of a beer. We found a place advertising themselves as "The oldest topless bar in Hong Kong", they even bragged about being shown in some James Bond movie, but I don't remember which one. What a ripoff! The bar was sectioned off into separate rooms and in our room the "topless" (she wore a translucent panty hose type top) )bartender was a 45ish year old black woman. We probably would have walked right back out, but I had to use the bathroom and while I was in there the bartender told Jongsoo that, since I had used the bathroom, we had to buy a drink. They actually had decently priced beer, but you end up getting pressured to buy the bartender drinks at full price. So, we didn't stick around there for long. We had planned on heading back to the Hong Kong side to walk around a bit, but we were both exhausted so we just went back to the hotel to sleep.
We got up at 6am Tuesday morning for the rushed trip back to Korea. Our flight was due to arrive at Incheon at 2:25, which was going to make it awfully tough for me to get to work by 4pm. When you factor in the 60 minutes it takes for the airport bus, I had 35 minutes to deplane, get through immigration, find my bags, get to the bus stop, pray that it came right away, then pray that in Ilsan I could get a taxi to the school. I knew it would most likely prove impossible, so I had warned a coworker with a break during my first class that I may need her to cover for me.
--> Page 5 -->
