Today, Thursday September 27th, would actually be the final day of the study tour. Tomorrow there is another 'nareisdag', an extra day without any activities planned by the official study tour. Today we went the whole day to Macau. The alarm sounded this morning around 8 o'clock. Exciting music sounded in the room of Roelof, Bart and undersigned which was needed to help us wake up. After the usual breakfast at the neighbour (a can of ice coffee and a sausage roll) the group went in the direction of the ferry. Our guide picked us up in a bus and started talking immediately. This time we could go through customs without any luggage and take comfortably our seats in the ferry. The Grootjanses and Wilfred got directly attention of the female beauties when they took their seats. Unfortunately the average age was around 65.. The passengers on the boat were making ridiculously many photos anyway. Even when the ferry wasn't departed yet. Our guide didn't come with us, because someone else would pick us up at the other side. This guide did seem to be a cool guy. We toured around the most important tourist sight seeings with a bus. This included a tower where you could bungee jump, the temple of the sea gods, the old city and the tomb of a Saint. At 16:00 we were dropped off at The Venetian, the biggest casino of the SAR Macau. Our organised tour ended here. We decided to meet again at half past six to get dinner together and till then we had some free time to walk around.
A cool anecdote: Macau's name is attributed to the Cantonese exclamation for 'Go away!'. The orignal inhabitants were yelling this to the Portuguese when they arrived in the 17th century. The Portuguese heard this so many times that they thought that this place was called that way! In the old town we lunched in small groups. I had a Portuguese chicken stew. While we were acting like real tourists, we tried the Portuguese food as well. It was incredibly nice.
We were flabergasted when we finally arrived in the casino. It was a gigantic casino, consisting of a huge amount of shops, card tables and meeting rooms. On the first floor a part of Venice was rebuilt, including clouds which were painted on the ceiling and canals with water and gondolas! After wandering about for a few hours I had seen it all. Therefore we got out prior to the agreed time to chill outside.
For dinner we went to another casino. Perhaps nice to mention is that Macau is the biggest gambling centre of the world, even bigger than Vegas. At every casino there are busstops with free shuttle busses to the other casino's, the ferry and the airport.
The dinner was eaten in a Portuguese restaurant inside a casino. This was my chance to eat Portuguese once again! After a speech of Wouter which closed the study trip we began to eat. After dinner we got another hour of leisure time and afterwards everyone went back to Hong Kong. Arriving there I consumed another beer with some other people on my room and went to bed.
All in all this was a nice excursion.
Denick Murray