On Sunday, while grocery shopping, I ran into someone I had met before leaving for Beijing. He informed me that there was a Facebook group for HKUST exchange students, and that there was a planned trip to Macau the next day. I checked out the Facebook group and found out that people were planning on leaving the next day at 1 to take the ferry to Macau.
The next day we met at 1 and then took the MTR to the ferry port, and after picking up the tickets we had bought online we boarded the ferry. We had got there just in time (5 minutes before the ferry left), and thankfully immigration wasn’t too difficult, so we didn’t miss the ferry. Our ferry ride was uneventful, the view of the harbor while we were leaving was good, but other than that we just saw a lot of water.
About an hour later we landed in Macau, went through immigration, then waited around at the Ferry station for a bit for some people that were coming on the next ferry. After they arrived we took a free shuttle to the Wynn casino. We looked around there for awhile and then got some food. The restaurant we went to had terrible service and took about 2 hours, but eventually we finished and headed toward the MGM casino.
The first thing we found out is that Casinos in Macau only accept Hong Kong Dollars as payment. They have exchange counters, but for some reason they don’t accept their own currency, which was annoying because some of had withdrawn or exchanged to Pataca (their currency) in order to save on exchange fees at the casino, but ended up paying them anyway. The MGM was a lot bigger than the only other Casino I have visited, Mystic Lake in Minnesota. Baccarat had the most number of tables, and there were some roulette and blackjack tables, as well as some poker tables. The did not have texas holdem poker though, which is the only type I know how to play so I didn’t end up playing poker. I sat down at the lowest minimum bet blackjack table I could find, which was still 100 HK. I was expecting to lose 500 HK at the casino over the night. I ended up losing the first 4 hands I played by one each time, and was then 400 down in less than 5 minutes. Everyone else wasn’t done though, so I just watched for the rest of the night, except for playing a little bit of roulette where I was able to bet 10 at a time instead of 100. In the end I lost the 500 I was expecting to.
After the casino we went and walked around the streets of Macau and found a bar that was playing music that we went to for a while. One advantage of having like 25 people is that anywhere you go you can make a happening place. From there we moved on to the Playboy club in the Sands Casino. That club was awesome. We were pretty much the only people there, but the club was on the 44th floor of the casino, and had an awesome view of the city.
At 2:30 they decided to close (probably because we weren’t buying many drinks) and we left to walk back to the ferry. We took the 4 am ferry back to Hong Kong. By the time I got back to my room and went to bed it was 7:30 in the morning, so I got to enjoy the sunrise. I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until 3 pm.
The next day (Tuesday) was pretty chill, I stayed on campus all day. I got some food and then at night some of the exchange students went down and made a fire in a fire ring down by the ocean.
Wednesday was orientation, this meant I had to wake up at the early hour of 8 am, which was 3 or 4 hours earlier than I had been getting up. Waking up this early will forever have an effect of me because I had to take my student ID picture and I look terrible. I look half asleep and I didn’t shave or do anything to make my hair look like I didn’t just get out of bed.
Orientation overall was pretty boring. It was a lot of stuff I already knew from reading my manual, and we spent a lot of time talking about how to register for classes which I have already done. One interesting thing I did learn is that the median monthly wage is 11,000 HK. That explains how food is so cheap. Lunch was free and tasted good, they gave us more western food then we were used to. After lunch we had a meeting with a guy from the US consulate. The main gist of the talk was that the US can’t protect us if we decide to be morons in Hong Kong. He told us many times that he doesn’t like visiting people in jail and not being able to do anything for them. He also gave us the number for the Marines if we have a big problem that we need some help with.
After orientation, we went to downtown to go the Flower Market. The flower market is a tradition for Chinese New Years. It is basically I giant street market that only has flowers. If I had my own house and/or someone to buy flowers for while here it would have been a perfect place, but since I have neither it was only really cool to see so many flowers at the same time.
After seeing the market, and buying some tacky Chinese New Years decorations, we went and got something to eat. Luckily the place we went to had an English menu, and I decided to be adventurous and tried some goose intestines. Basically, they tasted like regular meat but with a texture of chewy fat.
Thursday I woke up early to go to Lantau Island. The school had organized a trip, that I didn’t find out about until I got to campus, but luckily I was able to sign up for it the morning of. We got on a bus and drove to Lantau Island. At the top of the island is a giant statue of a sitting Buddha and a monastery. The most exciting way to get to the top is a gondola. The gondola passes over a bay and then along a mountain side up to the Monastery, and had a very awesome view. At the top there is a touristy street with lots of shop. We passed through this area, and went to the Monastery part, where we had a vegetarian meal. After the meal I walked up to the pedestal with the giant Buddha. I took some pictures and then wasted time until the bus left.
The bus took us to a fishing village. When we got there we took a speed boat out to look for dolphins, but we didn’t see anything. Then we walked around the fishing village. The village was made up of lots of shacks that were built on stilts over the water. The shacks were made out of what looked like pieces of sheet metal and garbage pieced together. Something that was odd though was that a lot of these shacks had satellites and large flat screen TV’s. It almost seems as if they are only living like that to keep being a tourist attraction, but they really aren’t that poor. We all left the village and briefly stopped to look at two giant bridges that are right next to each other and going over the bay. Then the bus dropped us off at the MTR so that we could go to New Years Parade.
The parade was really busy, but I was actually pretty disappointed by it. There were large breaks between floats, and even then the floats were mostly big advertisements without much exciting stuff. After the parade I went with another exchange student and got some pizza. My pizza was more expensive than other meals (102 HK), but it was worth it.
Friday was a slow starting day, but eventually we headed down to Tsim Sha Tsui (TST) in Kowloon to watch the fireworks. The bay was completely packed, but we eventually found a place where we could see the fireworks and the skyline of Hong Kong. We had one building in the way, but the spot was still pretty good. When the fireworks started it was 27 minutes of the best fireworks I have ever seen. There were lots of them. They had fireworks that made rabbits (it is now the year of the rabbit), smiley faces and what I though was coolest is they had fireworks that spelled out I YHK across the sky. I had never seen fireworks spell anything. The letters were slightly messed, but still awesome. The grand finale was the most fireworks I had ever seen at one time. And the noise of the explosions was constant and very loud. I have a video that is around 10 minutes long of a lot of the fireworks, that I will post eventually. After the fireworks we took the ferry across the bay to go to LKF to go to a club. The ferry had a very cool view of the skyline of both Kowloon and Hong Kong.
No comments:
Post a Comment