Slightly Wrong Turn

Waking up in luxury seems to be roughly the same as waking up anywhere else. You feel tired and want to go to bed. When the bed is more comfortable, even more so. Though we discovered that we were in fact only staying in a four star hotel. Biggest casino in the world, but we’re still a star short of the real thing. One of us is already eying a place in Singapore with a pool that seems to end in a cliff edge on the 50th floor or something like that.

But in case we get bored of our stay in Venice, we can always walk to Paris instead, all while staying within the comfort of air-conditioned corridors. We barely arrived and someone already started playing the Accordion, singers showing off their voices with Christmas carols, and another couple of metres gets you to the Eiffel Tower. And if Paris wasn’t enough for you, the next place has a Ferris Wheel integrated into the building, going in a figure eight pattern. Macau is weird …

We also have yet to see a single Macau money note. Whenever we pay for anything, our change comes as Hong Kong dollar notes. The only example of local currency were the coins we got. But like, even the various machines in the Casino actually only seemed to take Hong Kong dollars. Admittedly, the two currencies are tied to one another, with an exchange rate that’s basically 1-to-1, but surely the currency can’t be so embarrassing that they don’t want to show us a single note.

I am also currently sitting in the Hong Kong Airport, which is about 3000km from where I wanted to be sitting right now. It is however definite improvement from being in the Macau Ferry Terminal, which is where they threatened to keep us when they realised that we misread the time of our flight from Hong Kong and weren’t going to make it. Two hours later, and contingency plans have successfully put in place. On a funny side note though, there is another flight that was leaving for our original destination, at the same planned time, that is currently experiencing a 10 hour delay … We assume, it wasn’t because of us.