Post #44 – November 24, 2012 – Macau and Hong Kong, China

What we did: Turbo Jet trip from Macau to Hong Kong, shopped in Causeway Bay
Budget: $200; Spent: $182

Patty here, writing from Hong Kong!

We woke up this morning at 9am for breakfast with hopes of seeing more of Macau. Unfortunately it took us awhile to pack and find the restaurant we wanted to eat breakfast at, so no sight-seeing took place. But that’s okay, cause we feel like we got a nice taste of Macau and we left satisfied. I liked Macau more than Jeff did. It really had a latin flavour and reminded me a lot of Mexico. I think it was a combination of the architecture, the weather, the smells of seafood, corn, and well, pollution, as well as the Portuguese signs everywhere. Every sign is written in both Cantonese and Portuguese.  It was very neat to see the two cultures fused together. But, I did find that most of the Portuguese presence was simply remnants of the past.  Albeit its official language is Portuguese, almost nobody speaks it, and there are few full-blooded Portuguese living there today. Having said that, there are many locals that did seem to have a slight Latin look about them, very much like Filipinos actually. Fair to say these are likely people of Macanese decent.  Still, I’d say the majority of the population in Macau are Chinese.

Back to our day today, it took us an annoyingly large amount of time packing our stuff for some reason. We just have WAY too much stuff and we are at point where we cannot wait to rid ourselves of all our excess baggage. It doesn’t even feel like we brought that much, but when you have to keep packing and unpacking it all it just becomes a real pain the more stuff you have. So we fully intend on sending most of our warm clothing home, plus our jeans, and my runners. Wooooo can’t wait!

After packing we went looking for breakfast. Once we finally arrived, we thoroughly enjoyed the meal.  They had fresh baked croissants, tasty/healthy smoothies, and decent coffees at this place called Cuppa Coffee. Initially, we paid the bill with RMB (aka Yuan) and the exchange was 1 for 1 with Macanese Patacas, equating to a big loss for us. Luckily, we had HK$ from our bit of gambling the night before and so we got our RMB back and paid with HK$, which are still slightly better than the Macau Patacas but still gave us a much better rate. The currencies in Macau are a bit of a problem for tourists. They accept 3 different currencies and no doubt the locals must all make a killing on simply exchanging them all.

We got back to the hotel to grab our stuff and head down to the lobby to catch a free shuttle to the Macau Ferry Terminal. By the time we collected ourselves, the shuttle was full which meant we would have to wait another 30 mins for the next one – no big deal. We finished writing our blogs and sent them to Chris to post. Come to think of it, we could have probably done it ourselves since we now have access to both facebook and our blog. Shoot. Well Chris if you’re reading this, hopefully those are the last posts we ask you to post for us. Thanks so much for all your help!

We finally got on the shuttle at around 12:45pm and arrived at the ferry terminal shortly thereafter. The Turbo Jet (a very high speed boat) leaves every half hour so we were on one in no time but not until we went through customs since Macau is practically considered its own country (only kind of). We were tempted to take the Helicopter ride over to Macau which departed just next to the Turbo Jet, but we decided the price tag of $359 a ticket was slightly out of our budget range. But then again, so were the superior tickets on the Turbo Jet so sadly, contrary to Ivan’s recommendation, we went for the Economy tickets. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to buy the superior class tickets, especially when we saw they were twice the price of the economy class tickets. I’m sure the superior class would have been much better, but we gotta make our trip last 5 more months! We sat in the very middle of the boat with an aisle and 4 seats between us and the windows, and it wasn’t much of a fun ride. In fact, if Jeff and I hadn’t totally focused on our breathing most of the 55 minute trip, we would have been just like the poor girl sitting next to us – puking in a brown paper bag. I don’t know how fast the Jet was going, but it looked like we were taking off on a plane for most of the trip. And, frankly I was happy we weren’t sitting next to the window because it was cloudy for starters and whenever I did, I quickly became nauseous. Well, it got us from point a to point b safely so it wasn’t so bad after all, plus it was a short ride.

When we got off the boat we had to wait in line again to go through Hong Kong customs. This took about 20 minutes and we had no trouble getting through. Just seemed like an unnecessary procedure.

We managed to find the subway pretty quickly and eventually arrived in Causeway Bay, the area of Hong Kong our hostel is located. We were doing great up until that point. We even realized we had the precise directions to our hostel from the metro station in an e-mail from the hostel. So we kept the e-mail open and as we’re being guided through the completely insane streets of Hong Kong to our hostel, the e-mail disappears. We spend what felt like the next 30 minutes searching through Jeff’s inbox for the e-mail. At this point, we’re both infuriated and rapidly losing patience with everything. The whole experience was very reminiscent of arriving in Kyoto that special morning after our night long bus trip. It even played out like it did in Kyoto. Some random strangers who happened to be staying at the same hostel  came up to us and pointed us across the street and directly at our hostel… so yes it was right in front of us, we were even facing it!! But, in our defense when you’re in that state of mind, and there are masses of humanity coming at you every which way, and tons of traffic blowing by, you think there’s no way you’re gonna find it without that e-mail. Funny, it was right in front of us. How lucky we were that we looked so helpless and lost, that two travelers just happened to cross our paths and just happened to be staying at our same hostel and say “hey are you looking for Yesinn hostel”. Crazy.

It sucks to be back to sleeping in a mixed dorm again, but at least the place is clean, the service is friendly and its only for 3 nights. It was around dinner time when we got ourselves settled in the hostel and mapped out our plans for the remainder of the day. There weren’t any good options for food that our book suggested so we ended up finding a mall and a floor full of restaurants. We ended up at a Sushi restaurant where we ate what we both agreed was the best sushi we have ever had. Yup, we thought they did it better than the Japanese themselves. And the price was reasonable. Here are some pics from dinner. The platter consisted of an assortment of salmon sushi, and those are miso soups in behind:

Afterwards, we spent the rest of the night roaming Causeway Bay and following the weak recommendations a site gave me for shopping. Although there were many beautiful fashions, everything was very pricey. There were so many designer stores too. We got tired of the area so we headed elsewhere. We thought we’d have more luck at the market near our hostel that the book recommended called Jardine’s Bazaar. Well, the book was wrong about this place. It was correct that the market has lots of stuff, but all of it was cheap, unfashionable, and poor quality. We were discouraged so we treated ourselves to a slurpee at 7/11. It was crazy good! Jeff’s bro is a slurpee connoisseur so we took this picture to get his signature of approval on the quality and texture. I do think it’s important to point out the flavours we got were Passion Fruit Green Tea and the other was Lychee Yogurt so they should get extra points for creativity/innovation:

Looks like we are in a predicament where we cannot find a happy medium between, fashion and price. We’re going back to the drawing board for a plan of attack on Hong Kong’s retailers. But, not until we hit up Ocean Park tomorrow!

Goodnight,

Patty