William Reardon’s Blog

After the trip to Beijing, I headed south to spend a few days in Macau & Hong Kong. Macau is a ~45 minute ferry ride from Hong Kong, and currently the gambling capital of the world (surpassing even Vegas).

Flying into Hong Kong International, I was surprised how easy it was to get to Macau. Just like a stop-over on an international flight, you can transfer to your ferry without going through Hong Kong customs or security. You just hand over your baggage claim tickets from your airline & they even pick them up for you. Pretty sweet.

Macau was a confusing series of streets that twist & turn. Luckily casino’s are all over the place, and as I map showing each casino’s location, they ended up being really good landmarks. The other problem was realizing how small Macau really is. I’d walk for a bit, looking for a street. Unable to find it, I’d get to an intersection & try to find that on that map. I couldn’t find it until I realized I’d crossed half map & walked right off the page I was looking at. Macau is small.

I visited a few of the sites, including Largo do Senado, the Ruins of St. Paul’s and Fortaleza do Monte.

Like in Beijing, the Friendlies where everywhere. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one in the head. Although if you do do that Panda here is gonna bust a cap in yo’ ass.

Of course, like Las Vegas, the city completely changes at night & come alive with neon. I gambled a bit while I was there, come out roughly even. Right now, it’s a bit early for Macau to become a travel destination by itself. Give it about 10 years though, and I expect it will truly be the Las Vegas of the East.

Next stop, Hong Kong.

As promised, some pictures of what a line of 10,000 people looks like:

The crazy thing was people were still streaming in from all directions. By the time tickets actually went onsale, it was estimated some 50,000 people had lined up.

It was a crazy 36 hours or so. We were busy through the night and somewhere around 2am we noticed the security forces that had assembled to protect our box office.

One part of the process involved counting batches of 250+ tickets. Around four in the morning, I realized people count sheep to fall asleep. Here I was trying to stay awake, having to count tickets!

With such high demand, things sold at a fairly brisk pace. So when things calmed down, Hui & I decided to head to the Olympic Green, and check out a few of the venues. Unfortunately, the entire area was blocked off by security fences, so we could only take pics from afar.

The last thing I’ll mention involves the elevator of our hotel. In the West, it’s not uncommon to skip the 13th floor. But I still can’t figure out why this particular hotel skipped not just 13, but 2 & 14 as well. I hope it wasn’t a cheap knock off of an elevantor — sorta how a “Rolex” in China might be missing a 5 or 9.

UPDATE: By coincidence, youtube just featured this AFP video about the final onsale.