The Good Life

Micol left us in the morning to catch her plane back to Belgium, signaling how close the trip now was to its eventual end. To ward off the awful images of snow-covered Belgium that kept entering our minds, we had lunch at Robuchon a Galera, the only Three-Michelin-Stars restaurant in Macau and, at less than a 100€ for a four-course meal with wine pairings, surely one of the best deals on the planet for world-class French dining. It is the only three-star meal I've ever tasted, and to my uncultured palate it fully lived up to its reputation.

We left the Wynn for the Venetian, eager to visit the world's biggest hotel. In late 2008 it was the flagship property on the Cotai strip, that reclaimed rectangle of land between Macau's two main islands, although it would surely be soon eclipsed by whatever will rise on all those construction sites around it. The Venetian is big: never before had I seen hotel direction signs with distance markings, thus: "Swimming Pool (670m)".

We spent the better part of the afternoon in the hotel itself. There's plenty enough in there to fill an entire day, and anyway the adjoining landscape was still somewhat barren. The high point might have been finding a rules leaflet for Craps, a game I've always found appealing for some reason, but which had up to this point remained completely incomprehensible to me. We stood for a long time next to the table, observing players, trying to make sense of it all. Nearly all patrons were Chinese, and they all followed the same little ritual before throwing the dice: looking at them from all sides, twirling them in their palm and on the table, making sure they were showing 6+2 right before throwing them. (Eight is a very lucky number in Chinese numerology.) As for the rules, we managed to figure a few things out, but lost interest before any of us got confident enough to wage any money. We did try Sic bo, a Chinese game played with three dice and similar to roulette: easy to understand, but boring. We then headed for the concierge and asked him for cool places to go to. He circled a couple spots on a map, ironically all quite close to the Wynn, which we probably shouldn't have left, but no worries: we simply gave the map to a taxi driver and a few minutes later crossed the majestic bridge back to the peninsula. Both islands looked magnificent under the last rays of the sun slowly setting on the South China Sea.

We continued to walk aimlessly, now in the warm evening air of the outside rather than the sterile air-conditioned version. Eventually we found a small street just off the MGM Grand and decided to lazily make our way down it, trying a different drink in each bar. This set us on a long and tortuous journey that ended at D2, a night club on an unremarkable floor of a nondescript high-rise, somewhere. We had barely ordered our first (complimentary) round when, out of nowhere, three girls joined us with a greeting of "Sawadee-Ka." I asked if they were from Thailand, which they confirmed, and we chatted for a couple minutes before they asked us to buy them drinks. Possibly they were just three girls out on the town who thought an evening with Europeans would be fun, but it seemed a lot more likely they were literally starting their shift, so we declined. This kind of thing happens quite regularly. Last time in Vegas, my taxi had barely left the airport when the cabbie passed me a 100+ pages catalog of girls, all slim, tall, tanned and eager to join me in my hotel room for a "massage". And yet Macau manages to make Sin City seem prudish. One of my friends started dancing with a random girl, and after barely a minute was told subtly: "come, we go to the toilet".

Around 3-ish a nearby waitress struck my camera while I was taking a picture, and my glasses flew off. The next ten minutes were easily the worst of the whole trip for me, as I crawled through the dark bar, half-blind, desperately trying to locate these glasses, already imagining spending the next few days squinting at everything. I was almost ready to give up when an extremely nice Thai girl appeared out of nowhere and asked "Are these yours?" I waied deeply, thanked her a hundred times and hugged her and bought her a drink. (The only reward she would accept.)

Soon afterwards I left the bar and headed back to the Venetian, by a somewhat circuitous route. I got a few Grand Lisboa tokens at a BlackJack table, as a souvenir. I stopped by the Wynn for a plate of drunken chicken and a glass of mango juice. Finally I got to "our" casino and found the last open craps table in the entire city. I played a few rounds, got to throw the dice twice, and even made a little money. (The rules are not that hard after all.) Now quite satisfied with this small little night out, I took the elevator to our suite, where everyone was already fast asleep. It was 7:30 in the morning and I could see the sun rise through the hotel window.