track our trek

sorry...this post is out of order...macau was before china...

to escape the throngs of holiday travelers in hong kong, we decided to take a ferry to macau for a couple of days…we booked 2 nights in macau and our next 3 nights in beijing….(the most advance booking of the trip so far!) at the ferry terminal, we scouted out the bus stops and jumped on the number 3 bus headed for our hotel. it took us a good 15 minutes to orient ourselves on the map once the bus got going, by which point we realized we’d ridden well past our stop! so we decided to get off at the next “major” intersection and backtrack…turns out the next major stop was at the chinese border!!! lol! the bus driver yelled at us to get off when we asked for help, so we jumped off and back onto a different number 3 bus headed back towards the ferry terminal. who knew you could ride the bus across the whole country in 30 minutes?? didn’t look that small on our tourist map! the jokes continued when we got back to the ferry terminal, jumped in a taxi and proceeded to try to pantomime & explain our hotel’s address to the chinese driver…macau is an interesting place…it was colonized by the portuguese for years, so all the street names and much of the architecture is portuguese, but 95% of the people are chinese and do not speak or read portuguese! our map with portuguese street names was getting us nowhere! the cab driver kept trying to drop us off at the mandalay hotel (waayyy out of our budget!) until eventually we found a map w/ some chinese writing.
we checked in and walked to the main town square and found some dinner at a little spot on a street straight of a european movie…a bit of a strange feeling…halfway through the meal, we realized we were eating with forks for the first time in weeks, and billy ocean was playing on the radio. lol! it was also interesting to see that macau patacas are tied to the hong kong dollar and they are all used interchangeably! (btw, kb we are collecting for you.)
hot rainy weather put a bit of a damper on our day and a half there, but we made the most of it and did a walking tour through the city, checked out the old fortress and the macau museum, where there was a really great chinese paper cutting exhibit. at the fortress we took about a dozen pictures with about 30 toursists from mainland china who had never seen black people before. jokes! a preview for what’s to come in china, i’m sure!