Macau

We took the Turbojet to Macau, at apparently the same time as the entire population of southern China; there were mounds of people at the ferry terminal, and even after the groups going to Shenzhen went on their separate way, the place was packed.

A queue, to your average Chinese person, is a thing of mysterious wonder. All those people, lining up for some obscure purpose. What could it be? Why are they all looking intently at the doors to the ferry?

So amazed and bamboozled by this are they, people crowd around the queue, wandering up to stay alongside the people at the front, rather than joining the queue at the back. Who would ever want to wait for anything, after all?


It's not that which annoys me; it's the people who have apparently never travelled before, so they don't understand that it might not be amazingly smart to barge to the front when the doors to the ferry open, and then turn around and stand stock-still, waiting for their friend who's five rows of people away to hand them a ticket. Just get on the damn ferry, people.

At the other side, immigration was packed. I was baffled why exactly so many people were all travelling to Macau on a Sunday morning, and why so many of them were all going to Fernando's for lunch. We gave this up as a dead loss and went to the MGM instead.

This was good for me, because all I can eat at Fernando's is bread and Superbock beer, and because I was hoping to see all the panda effigies in the main hall of the MGM.

Sadly they had all gone, replaced by the world's biggest lion dance lion. I'm not exaggerating here, it's entered the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest lion dance lion ever. Whether recording which is the biggest ever lion dance lion actually sells more Guinness is one of life's ineluctable mysteries. As is the question of whether the best way to refer to a lion dance lion is as a lion dance lion, or not. As a rule, having the same noun repeated four times in one sentence is something of a bad sign. Mainly because "four" is unlucky, I suppose.

We walked on to the Wynn, to watch the fountains, then took a cab to the Venetian. I'd only ever been downstairs before; this time we went up to explore, and on one of the upper floors we found the gondoliers, pushing boats full of tourists around.

Now, it's not the fictional version of Venice that's been created that I object to. It's locating it fifty feet above ground level that I have trouble with.

Well, that and the fact that the gondolas seem to float everywhere backwards, without the gondoliers doing anything. It's almost as if the whole set up is fake.