MACAU - LAND OF MADE-UP HAPPINESS?

Just outside of Hong Kong, there is an island that seemed to be separated from the rest of the world.

Here, there are no worries, no poverty, no class differences. If you get to this island, you become one with the high horses. Everyone will open doors for you. You'll be surrounded by luxury and clean, shiny spaces, like dust itself felt it was to poor to land anywhere.

The buildings will be mountains here, the hotels are cities in them self and everything, everything, will have golden façades.
Of course, this is all just façades.

If you feel lucky, you can try to make this feeling sustainable by leaving with the motherload; Macau is the Asian equivalent to Las Vegas.

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We were not planing to go outside our Suitcasepacking travel style though. No private limousine awaited us when we jumped off the ferry from Hong Kong mainland. Instead, we wandered around like lost boys on the terminal for a good twenty minutes before we found the travel agent that would lead us to the right bus to get to the center of things. By then, all the Chinese travel tours were long gone.

We jumped of the local bus MT1 from Taipa Ferry Terminal at Praca Ferreira Amaral and was greeted with a bright... Grey-ish sky.

Above is the Grand Lisboa Casino, a true landmark for Macau. We just had to go inside.

...As luck would have it, we could not take any pictures from in there. Julia tried but was immediately screamed at by a horde of staff and had to delete all the pictures under the watching eye of an angry Chinese man in orange suit.
At least we tried.

Photo by @juliiiaaxelsson

After that we went on to see the old town. Macau was once a Portuguese colony which you could see the traces of by the bilingual signs, and I thanked my six years of Spanish for being able to tell the way for the first time in weeks. (I'm aware that it's not the same language but combined with a heavy addiction of Latin languages in general, Portuguese is actually understandable.)

Old town was a must, according to the web, so we headed there.

Photo by @juliiiaaxelsson

(But first an ice cream break, of course.)

The big event of Old Town was supposed to be the ruins of Saõ Paulo.

Photo by @juliiiaaxelsson

I was very impressed.

In my defence, I was in third day with less than 6 hours sleep, so I was actually mentally sleeping when this picture was taken.

Anyway.

It was something about this city being too perfect. The ruins of Saõ Paolo illustrates that spot on - it's just the exterior left. There's nothing in it, no depth.

Macau was a lot of empty spaces just waiting on people to fill them.

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After a recap on the stairs (meaning: a successful attempt to not fall asleep right there), we were just about to go back to the casino area to take some photos of all the blinking lights as darkness had started to fall when a couple of tourists wanted to take pictures with us - you know, because we were non-chinese. That is an experience I grew tired of last time in China, but for Julia, this was the first time.

We stayed outside the casino for a while, trying to make justice to the quite impressive sight we had in front of on camera, and then we headed to Hard Rock for me to buy this place's souvenir: pins pins pins.
And well, it ought to be one or two drinks as well.

We returned to the ferry terminal at 11, a little tipsy and quite frankly, glad to go back to civilization again. I missed the pulse of Hong Kong.

Macau was, however spotlessly perfect, at times a living dead.

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