Macau City

After lunch since we still had loads of time, we decided to take the free bus down to the city. To get around the main attractions in Macau, you just have to go to the nearest big hotel and for sure they have a free bus to where you want to go. Again Over-The-Top-ness and all of these are so that the casino can bring more people to the casino to spend money. The bus from City of Dreams stops right in the city near....

Why Casino Lisboa is significant is because it is one of the first hotels and Casino in Macau, it is owned by Stanley Ho which is one of Hong Kong's billionaire. In 2008, they decided heck it is not enough we need to make a bigger more outstanding hotel and they built the Grand Lisboa. I think they had the Over-The-Top thing high in their mind and they decided we need to built a hotel which is so Over-The-Top it beats everyone by a country mile....

The cool thing about Casino Lisboa and Grand Lisboa is.....

More then 20 years ago, my parents were in Macau and took a picture in front of Casino Lisboa and fast forward 20+ years it is still there and....

now they are taking a picture in front of the Grand Lisboa. Hopefully in the next 20 years I can bring my parents back to Macau and take another picture. Wouldn't that be special.

After we checked out the Lisboa hotel, we went looking for the famous St Paul's Ruins. We have to walk through the main shopping street of Macau and man it was a weekday and still the amount of people around here is crazy.

When we finally found the Ruins of St Paul, the first thing we did was....

Family photo la of course. Then I went crazy taking pictures of the Ruins.....

After all the walking and picture taking, we got hungry and we had to of course have a Macau speciality which is...

It is the famous Macau Pork burger. This was the first one we had and it was nice but not special. Later in the trip, my cousin brought us to the first place that started it all and it was even better. We walked around the city and did some shopping and we went back in the evening to meet up with my cousin for dinner. As we got off the bus all tired and exhausted, we saw this...

Again super Over-The-Top-ness. My cousin apparently didn't think we walked enough so she made us walk from the City of Dreams towards The Venetian and ending up at Old Taipah village for dinner. The Venetian at night was really nice..

We had some Portuguese food and oh I forgot to mention that our luggage was still at The City of Dreams so we had to walk all the way back to City of Dreams (my cousin stays near Old Taipah village) and luckily my parents decided to take a cab back to my cousins place. That concludes and very packed first day in Macau and tomorrow we are going Hong Kong for a day trip. Stay tuned.

City of Dreams

This place is really the City of Dreams. Actually it is a hotel in Macau where it was basically our landmark while we were in Macau. I think it has been 10 over years since my family (my dad, mum, bro and I) were on a holiday together. What made it better was we were joined by my sister in law, Amy and one of my cousin who is working at the City of Dream itself.

Before coming to Macau, my cousin told me that you just get off the plane, go through immigration and customer and find a lady wearing purple shirt and says City of Dreams. Go up to her and say you want to go to the hotel and she will usher you to a bus. It took us about 30 min and whole lot of running around to finally find the bus and we were on our way to the meeting point. We could actually see the City of Dreams from the airport so it was about a 10 min ride.

The next instruction my cousin gave to me was to wait for her at the hotel's virtual aquarium. In my mind was thinking it is one of those simple projector beaming to a wall a standard "movie" of an aquarium. How wrong I was because as we walked into the main hotel entrance we see...

Check out how big the screen is compared to the people in front of it. If you look properly, in front of the screen there is also water flowing down to make it look like a real aquarium. At this point, I didn't know that in Macau everything is XXXLarge and everything is Over The Top which is all built from casino money. The other thing is also everything has a water theme to it. I think it has something to do with luck.

When we finally met up with my cousin, she told us that actually City of Dreams manages 3 hotels which is Hard Rock Macau, City of Dreams itself and a very exclusive Crown hotel. Opposite the City of Dreams is the very famous Venetian which is modeled exactly like the Venetian in Vegas but that is for another day....

We were walking towards Hard Rock Hotel Macau and we saw this....

If you think that pattern is cool, what is even more cool is that they used drum sticks to make that pattern. So each "pixel" is actually a drum stick and they must have used thousand of drums sticks just to do that. After the Hard Rock Hotel, we went over to....

Why I say this is an exclusive hotel is because you cannot book any of the rooms in this hotel. Apparently, they are all suites and you must be invited to stay at this hotel. I think you can only stay in this hotel if you blow like a couple of hundred thousand bucks in the casino. The decor of this hotel is superbly modern....

After the introduction to the hotels which we do not get to stay in. Oh yea we are being cheapskate and we are staying with my cousin in her apartment instead of one of this swanky hotels. We proceeded to lunch at...

Another show of Over The Top-ness...

That is the ceiling decor and man that ball of glass was huge and the ceiling was super high. I think the ceiling is as high as a 2 or 3 storey building. We had a great Dim Sum lunch and here are some of what we had...

My Dad

My Mum

The lunch was fantastic and the egg tarts actually have bird-ness on it. Crazy right? The lunch I think was crazy expensive but because my cousin works in the hotel, she gets 25% off and she called another of her colleague to join us and with both of them working in the same hotel and their ID badges, lunch was 50% off. Her colleague is actually in charge of the casino and the keeping the guest happy. That means she could get some complementary stuff which she got us some VIP tickets for this show called Bubble. We were like what is this? Bubble? We walked in and it was HUGE!!!! dome and when the show started, we were just goobbed smacked. First....

We were treated to some jelly fish coming from the ceiling and the center came down and....

As you can see the water theme to the attractions in the casino. The cool this about this is that they could shape the water to all kinds of shapes and even diamonds. I was majorly impressed with that water fountain until....

Just walking around one set of hotel, we were totally impressed already. Can't wait to check out the rest of Macau. Stay tuned....