Business adventure in Gangxi

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Macau SAR!!!

Simon and I went to Macau this Saturday. We woke up at 8h00 and were in the public transport an hour later. The final trip was made on a catamaran boat that takes the roughly 70km distance between Hong Kong and Macau in 1 hour. We got on the island (it is actually not an island anymore since major reclamation have made it a peninsula) around noon.

Macau is the oldest European colony in China and dates back to 1557!!! It was administered by Portugal until it was ceded back to China in 1999, two years after Hong Kong. It is a very dynamic region with steady growth and high GDP.

Upon arrival we quickly met Pramod Agrawal, a Indian working in London for a textile company named Entyce. Even though Simon thaught he was a plain vanilla fake watch dealer from downtown Tsim Sha Tsui, but his “all good jobs are only landed by French Napoleonists” prevailed. He was on a business trip in HK but had a day off. We found a tourist service for 600HK$ (about 100CAD) that takes us to all the sites in Macau for 3 hours. Macau is pretty small and the trip proved to be more than enough. We got an English speaking local which drove us all around the place in a 1995 Mercedes!!!

Simon at the portuguese fortress

First thing you notice throughout the streets of Macau is the striking similarity it has to the Mediterranean cities. The buildings are painted, red, green, blue, and yellow. Flowers are hanged on the side of the streets. It is simply less tense and warmer place than Hong Kong overall. Even the people have a laid back axpression on their face, Europe does something good to people!!!!

downtown square

First stop was a temple. All temples in China look alike. A big fat smiling Buddha in the middle of the room and a lot of incense sticks burning. The smoke from the incense is meant to go up to heaven and transmit wishes to the dead. It is a common thing to build paper belongings and everyday use object out of paper and burn them in the temples so as to give the dead what they need to have a comfortable life up there.

The best thing we probably saw was the almighty Saint-Paul cathedral: the official Macau landmark. It was completed in 1602 and was the largest Christian church in Asia at the time. Unfortunately it was destroyed by a typhoon in 1835 so only the façade is standing today.
The wedding date will be announced soon, I'm trying to introduce the harem in China. Macau proved to be pretty liberal on the concept and offered me a wife as a sign of gratitude!

From there on we saw many things, which are worth mentioning only if it is the first time you get out of your country of origin. The tour ended downtown, where our fine senses led us to a great Portuguese restaurant. We had ourselves nice marinated meat. By the way, Macanese use the potaca to pay for their purchases, but the currency is pegged to the HK$ so both circulate freely in the territory.

The whole day wrapped up in the “Lisboa” casino, now the second biggest in Macau. The average revenue of a Macanese casino is 5 billion dollars, which is higher than Las Vegas since last year. Four new casinos were under construction at the moment of the visit. We contributed to the region economy by rapidly losing 600HKD!!! It was absolutely worth it.

This tower was built in 1999. It is a copy of a tower in New-Zealand but 10 metres higher, 338 metres overall. It was built by Macau's richest casino owner to fill out the view from his hilltop villa. That's how I would like to see things some day as well!

HK museum of history

This week end, I was bored of staying at home and decided to get to the Hong Kong museum of history. It was quite a good decision. I spent a good three hours and a half in there. The museum has been created about 30 years ago but a new building was constructed lately.



The exhibitions were set in a chronological order. First, I went through a detailed explanation of the geological formation of the region. They say if the earth was created one hour ago, Hong Kong has a life that represents the past 5 minutes (or 400 million years) the basic thing to remember is that most of the island is the result of intense volcanic activity that lasted 25 million years.



The whole visit was very interactive. Video clips and computers were installed everywhere to facilitate the understanding of the guests.



We then get to the prehistoric part, which is followed by a presentation of all the Chinese dynasties from the Hans to the Qings.




My favorite part was “Colonial powers and the Opium Wars” It was great since I saw most of the important point in one of my classes and could make links and deepen some interests. The last part was about Hong Kong in the last century. The Japanese invasion during the Second Great War, the problems with natural disasters and so on.




I got kicked out at the end. The museum was supposed to close at 19h00. But I had set the time back on my watch the same day by an hour as is done in the west. I was told nothing of the sort is done here and that the museum has been closed for 5 minutes!!! I was approaching the end anyways so no regrets 

Apart from that entertainment, I went to see an awful movie yesterday call “flightplan”. Not only it looked bad, the desrciption was borring, the very not celebrated Jodie Foster was the main hero, but it proved out to be worst than I expected. But what can you expect of 5 exchange students in front of an ultra modern movie theatre with only ONE English title???

And last but not least. Here goes the only picture at the museum with me. It is graciously provided to you by a security guard which took at least 2 minutes to understand that I was not asking where the bathroom is, but that I would like her to take a pisture of me!! Behind me is a typical 1960's style classroom in HK.