After meetings...off to Macau

Hong Kong - After all the meetings, I decided to take a nice stroll along the Harbour front located next to the Renaissance Kowloon Hotel. It is also called "Avenue of Stars" having the hand prints of HongKong famous movie stars similiar to Hollywood movie stars. The weather is very nice around 17 degrees and many times it reminds us of Perth.

At the end of the Avenue of Stars, there is the HK Space Museum and fortunately it is free entry on every Wednesday.

Macau - At around 8pm, took the jet foil (New World First Ferry) from Kowloon Harbour to Macau jetty. It took about 1hr and it was a smooth ride. There was meant to be a free shuttle bus to pick us up but did not know that it end at 9.15pm - we were 30 minutes late.

Macau like Hong Kong is part of China.  Macau, the former Portuguese colony is a  Special Administrative Region and has an area of 28.6 sq. km (about half the size of Singapore) - comprising of the Macau Peninsula (with 9.3 sq. km and connected to Mainland China), the islands of Taipa (6.5 sq. km) and Coloane (7.6 sq. km) and the reclaimed area Cotai (5.2 sq. km).    Macau official currency, the pataca is pegged to the Hong Kong  dollar which is also accepted as currency.   Chinese and Portuguese are the two official languages and most signs are displayed both languages.   Cantonese is the predominant Chinese dialect.

I took a taxi to MetroPark Hotel - you have to speak Mandarin or Cantonese in Macau otherwise you will have difficulty nagivating yourself around. This is a 3-star hotel and the room that was given to me was a smoking room - it was really bad - I could not breathe. This will be my hotel for the next 2 nights. The hotel staff had to spray air-refreshner and increased the speed of the air-con to rid the room of smoke. The manger told me there are so many smoking floors because many people from mainland China and Hongkonger come to Macau to smoke freely. There are no restrictions on where you can smoke in Macau - basically it is a smokers paradise.

There are no internet access in my room but all guest are given free 15 minutes to use the ground floor to access their email or internet daily - this was very troublesome.