Marvellous Macau Most Underrated City in the World

Well, those of you, who have heard of Macau, have probably already been notified it's a dirty, lame, poor man's Vegas-style slum...but you know me, I want to go everywhere....so, I figured a day trip from Hong Kong would be a perfect option. If it was so terrible, why were there ferries running every hour?


As we swish through the Harbor in our Hydrofoil, we pass signs like 'the SANDS' and 'Lucky's' and many other gambling dens. I am impressed there is even a man-made volcano and temple complex, which it turns out are both part of a gambling emporium! This IS NOT the Macau, I've come to see...I'm from the States, so I can get free drinks, chain smoke and buy lotto tickets anywhere I want to...the Macau, I've come to see...is the Macau nobody hears about.

I want the old town Macau, which is incredibly charming. We have low - if any expectations and I figure Old Town Macau is going to be like the Vegas strip before they renovated everything...instead...

It is a beautifully preserved, immaculately clean colonial village. Don't get me wrong, Old Town Macau probably takes up 1/4 of Macau and the rest is casinos and the seedy underlife that comes with them. However, this small part of Macau is most definitely worth the trip.



Our 5 dollar cab drops us off in front of the Town Hall and we walk down the cobbled streets of Largo Senado past the old Sisters of Mercy Hospital, the old banks, the classically Portuguese colonial monastery and numerous churches and cathedrals.



After perusing a mix of Starbucks, KFC, ancient Cantonese, and young hawkers, we see the ideal spot for an authentic lunch. Long Kei noodle house has been around for a couple hundred years and at first sight looks like a small temple with caligraphied wooden signs hanging outside and curtains blowing out of the windows. There is quite a line to get in but just like in NY Chinese restaurants the 'get em in, turn em out' method works quickly and we are seated in no time. The menu includes a great deal of animals I had never contemplated eating before...plates of chicken feet and slithering eel glide past our table. I'm not really sure what to order and start slow with chicken, pork noodles and a small Congee. I've never had Congee before and it is a delightful surprise. Incredibly warming and tasty, the kind of meal I'd imagine would be a dream on a freezing morning in mountainous China. Our child orders a plate of 'noodle', which indeed turns out to be the world's largest single noodle on a plate (Long Kei's specialty is noodles after all).



The rest of the afternoon, we sightsee the few sights there are to see. We see the beautiful Opera House, the State Library (most of which is just a new library, but we sweet talk the librarian into showing us what's left of the original owner's rooms), quite a few catholic churches and one street-side budhist temple. Macau is no Paris, but it's still worth a day trip. What surprised me most about old town Macau wasn't it's colonial architecture but that it was incredibly clean. The streets were spotless, the people were very friendly and not at all pushy, which somehow after all my international China-town experiences as well as Hong Kong, I was expecting. Yes, I'd go back in a second and this time, I'd try the eel and porcupine fry-up.