Misstakes and hangover in Macau

 Yesterday Diana and I had decided to finally visit Macau, which is located just one and a half hour from Hong Kong by ferry. We had been to an "all you can eat and drink wine and cheese" buffé tha previous night, so we ended up leaving  campus around twelve. The rain was pouring down.

 Since we were both pretty hang over, we did not realize that the ferry went to another terminal than the one that we had our minds on. Maybe in a normal condition we would have paid more attention, but now we just followed the crowd on to a bus, and got shutteled to this shopping mall, hotel, and casino.

 We entered in hopes that we could exit on the other side and find our way to the ruins that we wanted to visit. The place was quite 'golden'.

 We walked around and around and tried to figure out where we were.

 We ended up in something as surreal as 'little Venice', with a fake sky and chinese people in gondolas. The whole situation felt a bit bisarre in our condition. After maybe an hour of looking at maps and walking back and forwards we finally realized our misstake, and the whole thing ended up with us taking the shuttle bus back to the ferry terminal, jumping on another bus that took us across a bridge and to the "real Macau" (we had been in another area). By this time we both felt a bit ridiculous.

 When finally there, we tried to find something to eat. We both wanted something steady, like pasta, so we determendly started looking for it, in the even heavier rain. Meanwhile we were amazed by the contrast between the chinese and the portugese architecture.

 We ended up in this area (after a way to long time of being lost) and found a nice french place where they had pasta. I was determined to eat something vegetarian, so we skipped the portugese food since the reasturants we saw did not offer any.

 Once again, the contrasts of the city was striking.

 Somehow it felt like being in southern Europe, but in the same time it was very chinese, and on top of this there were a number of casinos as high as the sky.

 Before leaving again (after a pretty failed trip) we decided we wanted to visit some of the historical sigts, especially the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral which is very famous, and as Diana put it "the one in all the pictures".

 This narrow street suddenly made us both feel much better, it was very nice.

 Here, as in Taipei, you could make your own noode soup.

 I tried one of the famous egg tards, it was very good.

 The street names!

 They also sold a lot of compressed meat,apparently a portugese delicacy. We did not try that...

 Here is the ruins of the cathedral, which burned down in the 19th century (I think). Now only the front remains.

 The view from the stairs was this, pretty cool we thought and wished we had come in a sunny day, without hangover, so that we could have sat here eating an ice cream.

Diana got a message about typhoon varnings so we decided to hurry back to the ferry in order to get home. We thought about staying the night, to be able to see more of the city, but we had all ready bought our return ticket and I had to much packing and cleanng to do before leaving Hong Kong on Sunday. So we took the ferry back and after a long day it felt greater than ever to be back at the campus.