What happens in Macau, stays in Macau…

Macau is a part of China, that is the Las Vegas of the East. I took the high speed ferry over, and spent the trip talking to the Manager of the Marriott in one of the cities just outside of Beijing.

I walked downtown to Senado square, and then walked over to the Ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. Macau was held by the Portuguese for years, and is filled with European architecture … and custard tarts. If you have not had a Portuguese custard tart, go out and find one - you will not be disappointed…

I was going to head over to A-Ma temple, but it started to get dark, and I started to get tired, and I decided to head back to the mainland. So, I thought I would just grab a bus back. I grabbed the #12, it went back to the Ferry Terminal. I grabbed it in the right direction… except that it wasn't going the right direction. Apparently the #12 goes around the mountain the wrong way and way up north and then goes around in a loop and way down south again and finally goes up the other side of the mountain and back to the terminal. I got off and walked back to the terminal instead.

I had a look in a couple of casinos. No matter how glitzy and glamorous they make them, i only ever see despair or greed or an inherent need to show off and prove something from the people playing the games. No matter how much money I could afford to lose, I would not be spending it in a casino. Perhaps I am just not a gambler. I prefer to get my adrenaline other ways.

So the terminal rules are fun. I bought a ticket for the next available ferry, which was not leaving for one hour. They said I could get in the standby line and maybe get on an earlier ferry. So, I did. I stood in line for the next ferry, but I did not get on it. All of a sudden, all the people left in line jumped over the railings and dashed to the other end of the terminal. By the time I figured out that each ferry (they leave every 15 minutes) has it’s own standby line, it was too late to get anything but the ferry I was scheduled on.

I was going to go back to the night market in Kowloon. On the ferry, the lovely gentleman in the seat in front of me, snorted, blew his nose in his bare hands and picked his nose and wiped it on his jeans, on the seat, on his smart phone screen, anywhere he could reach. Even offering him a tissue did not deter him. There was a lovely big window, which acted like a mirror in the dark nighttime water, and displayed his activity larger than life. The two seats beside me were occupied by a lovely elderly Chinese couple, who were fast asleep. I did not have the heart to wake them by crawling over them, but I was almost positive I was going to need the sickness bag before the end of the trip. Apparently this is not uncommon behaviour. Some people also apparently clip their toenails and do many other things in public, that the Western Culture would not allow.

It was getting late and I decided that another trip up into the Kowloon markets was just not going to be on my agenda tonight. So, I grabbed the subway the couple of stops to my lovely Airbnb instead. It turns out, that maybe someone was watching out for me tonight. When I got back, I heard that the subway station I would have headed to in Kowloon had a molotov cocktail attack, and a number of people had been injured, just at the time that I would have been getting there. There are things that happen for a reason, sometimes we just never find out the reasons. We can only ever walk one path in life and we can never know what would have happened if things had been different. The secret is, to just keep walking the path you are on, and work with the choices you make, or the choices that are made for you. Fight for what you want, make decisions wrong or right, and move forward, because it is the only way you can go.