Hi all!

I recently had to make a little trip to Macau, as my 60day visitors visa expired. So I needed to re-enter Taiwan under a new visitor visa. This is a very common thing around these parts, and the most common cities for doing it are Hong Kong, Bangkok and Macau. Mostly because the flights to these cities are the cheapest. I did NOT want to go near Bangkok, and I didn't know much about Macau (so it was the obvious choice!)

Macau is known nowadays as the Las Vegas of the East or China. Gambling is legal here, and it is technically Chinese territory (but it is under a different administration or something...)

Macau Patacas and Hong Kong dollars are both legal tender, which means you can have a wad of notes all looking different and all of the same value. Some of the Hong Kong notes look like very unrealistic kids play money. But not even sort of realistic looking, just plain bright crazy money.

Macau is really a city crammed on two islands connected by bridges, so the airport runway was built out on the water on a man made island. This is a plane going down the taxiway towards the runway.

Macau was about to have their Grand Prix (not F1), so they were putting up netting and grandstands all over the place.

It was originally a Portuguese Colony (think Vasco de Gama), so the city has a really interesting mix of colonial stuff like this and also big new money from the casinos. Very clear in the big showy buildings!

Only the front facade remains of an old Portuguese church, but the foundations are still there behind it.

The Grand Lisboa is the most prominent hotel/casino, by day and night.

The 3 story casino area is inside that bubble shape, but it is just like the casinos in SA. Just a lot bigger, but I can only imagine the real Las Vegas casinos must be huge! If you wander around long enough you can stumble across some free food so I took the FULLEST advantage of that - no doubt a ploy to keep you from leaving!

But my favourite was probably the MGM grand, even though it is the most boring not offering any free entertainment to street walkers like me!

The Wyatt casino/hotel had musical fountains every 15mins, so I captured a bit of Disney.

There is Cliff coming to pick me up from the train station.

It was mission successful in the end, but I got a bit tired of the need to lie in order to get the visa. It is painfully obvious at immigration what I am doing, so I even put on the landing form at Taipei that my occupation was a teacher. The officer just looked at me and said he supposes I am not teaching in Taiwan, and I replied, well of course not!

Until next time!