Macao

26/06/2021

In July 2018, after our trip to Taiwan and Singapore, I visited Macao with my mom. I had only ever heard of Macao, or the “Asian Las Vegas”, from movies. It was exactly like it had been depicted to me, from the huge hotels and casinos to the replicas of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. It seemed that everything was inspired by Italy, Portugal and France.

The city’s occidental touch dates back to the sixteenth century, when it was a Portuguese colony and the oldest European colony in Asia. Macao has switch hands quite a few times between China and Portugal. After the Opium war in 1887, China handed Macao back to Portugal under the condition that they helped Hongkongers smuggle opium from India into China. During WWII, Macao’s inhabitants supplied fuel to Japanese planes. When the US found out, they decided to raid the city, but after protests, had to repay 20,000,000 USD to the Portuguese government. On December 1st 1999, Macao was proclaimed a Special Administrative Region when it was handed back to China, after more than 400 years of foreign occupation. 

Macau’s main economy comes from electronics and gambling, thus the nickname “Asian Las Vegas”. My mother and I stayed at a hotel in Cotai, if you have watched the movie “Now You See Me 2”, the hotel the four horsemen are taken to after being kidnapped was the one right next to ours. Cotai is a hub of resorts in Macao connecting the islands of Coloane and Taipa. We visited a huge shopping mall, the " Venitian", and were lost there for more than two hours, walking a total of fourteen kilometres. Every alley had the name of a real street in Paris.

My most vivid memory of Macau was of a show we watched called “La vie en rose.” There were acrobats who were performing summersaults before scoring hoops and cabaret dancers who twirled on stage.The actors were mostly Russian/Ukrainian, they spoke in a language that we didn’t understand but the audience thought that it was French.

The next day we watched “Ant-man 2”. The best part was when Dr./Hank Pym entered the quantum realm and everything was silent, then we heard a man snore in the cinema and everyone was startled. We also visited Macau’s historic centre, mainly the ruins of St.Paul’s cathedral which is now just a facade. Macau blends both Portuguese and Chinese culture and it's only a 30 minute boat ride away from HongKong. Now there is a bridge connecting HongKong, Macau and Zhuhai(China) so you can have breakfast in Macau, lunch in HongKong and be back in Zhuhai the same day.