This post should have been published in February 2009, after my trip to China in Christmas 2008… but it has lived happily since ever in my Drafts.

The last stop in the trip to China was Macao. It is, like Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region, as it also used to be a Portuguese colony, and now they are trying to integrate it with Mainland China.

It is pretty close to Hong Kong, and the two former colonies are linked with frequent and convenient ferries, perfect for a one-day trip. But note that you should add some time to your estimations for border crossing (you have to go through HK and Macao inmigration in both ways, which may take some time)… In my case, that day I spent around two hours in immigration lanes.

Macao is not a business center as Hong Kong, and it is not full of skyscrapers. The architecture of the city is very similar to what we can find in the Iberian Peninsula. Nothing really new to me, as you can imagine. So, the biggest interest in this sense was the contrast of being in a Chinese city, full of Chinese people, and with an Iberian look, apart from the funny bilingualism of Chinese and Portuguese.

But Macao is nowadays important in Asia for other reasons. It is the Asian capital for gambling and is perfectly comparable to Las Vegas in business importance. I do not like gambling, but as the city did not offer much to me and had some time left, I went to a casino. I chose The Venetian, because it is the one which appears in Ocean’s Eleven, so I wanted to feel like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, while watching live some human behavior totally new for me.