Macau Baby, Macau

Macau is the Vegas of China.  Like Hong Kong, it is an SAR (Special Administrative Region) of China, which means it gets to play by different rules than the mainland.  On Saturday, Foley and I took a day trip to this wonderful island, just a one-hour boat ride away.

Macau was a Portuguese colony until 1999.  It's a true fusion of European style and Asian culture.

The mosaic side walks and classic European buildings had me reminiscing past travels in Europe.  Fole's response "wouldn't know".  He's holding strong to his intention of going everywhere else in the world before Europe. We all have goals in life.

We walked around town for a while, ending up at a famous landmark called the Ruins of St. Paul's.  Where was once the largest Catholic church in Asia, now stands only the original stone facade, accredited as a UNESCO World Heritage site.  There are catacombs in behind the facade, but we had dinner reservations... I'm sure they'll keep until our next visit.

Macanese Chicken

Dinner was delicious. On a strong recommendation from a new friend, we went to a somewhat sketchy part of the city to a traditional Portuguese/Macanese restaurant called 'A Lorcha'.  I got a traditional Macanese chicken dish (chicken in coconut and turmeric sauce), Foley got a "very good" steak.  [As I'm writing this I asked him, "Was there anything special about your dinner?" Response: "Nope, just very good".  Man of few words.]

After dinner we took a long walk back to the other side of the island where the casinos are.  The first one we walked into neither Foley nor I recognized the game they were playing.  We thought it may be an 'Asian-style' game so we pressed on to a more recognizable casino, the Wynn.  As we walked into the Wynn Foley laughed.  He had looked up that mysterious game, which is called 'Baccarat'.  Apparently it is the one of the most popular casino games world-wide.  Good lord, we're such amateurs.  I went in search of a funny slot machine (because, yes, I play for the characters), while Foley watched poker.  My $100HK (about $12.50 Cdn) didn't last long (shocker).  We moved over to the Roulette table where we put the minimum bets on our favourite numbers.  Within 15 minutes we went from $150HK to $770HK... Done.  That beauty table paid for over half of our weekend trip.

After an impressive fountain show (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEpUfR2fj0I&feature=youtu.be), we walked back to the ferry docks and caught the 11:15pm ferry back to HK island.  Foley napped for the hour journey and I did some Cantonese homework.  That was our big night out.  Cripes, we are old for our age.

Sunday was a whole new adventure.  After a BodyPump class (yep, my gym has BodyPump, with English instruction! Amazing.), I came back home in the early afternoon to wake Fole up.  The day before, while walking for hours around Macau, we had decided to finally go for a foot massage (reflexology massage, actually) on Sunday.  This is a very common past-time here, and one that we're both interested to participate in.  There was one place that looked decent, which we decided to try out. [looked decent = ground level, major street, saw many people of various ethnicities going in and out, essentially got a comfortable feeling that it was not a dodgy business doing dodgy-surprise things].

We went into the window-less room, filled with more than 30 comfy chairs and ottomans, and people getting foot massages everywhere.  A strange community feel to the experience.  An upgrade option for only $50HK extra ($6.25 Cdn) was a shoulder and back massage, so obviously that was happening.  We had two men rubbing our backs and feet who had about 3 words of English between them.  Overall the experience was great, save for the bruises on my lower back (not exaggerating, have photos).  If you haven't tried reflexology before, the essence is that there are 'reflexes' in your feet for every part of the body.  By pushing on a certain part of the foot, they can tell what parts of your body are holding tension or injured, and supposedly release some of said tension or inflammation.  My biggest sources of pain were connected to my knees, lower back, and stomach/intestines (all typical problems for me).  Foley's biggest reaction was for the sciatic nerve (lower back).  Also a very impressive find. Considering these men knew nothing about us, they figured out our 'weak points' pretty quickly.

Have you ever had a massage where they make loud slapping sounds by hitting you with a slightly cupped hand?  These guys did that.  I was a little taken aback when that slapping found it's way down to my tailbone... I was being spanked!  I wasn't sure how to react to this, when out of the corner of my eye I watched Foley get spanked by his guy.  I took a mental picture, which I shall cherish forever.