Forget 401(k). Give Jacqui money & send'er gamblin
Trip Start
Jan 01, 2009
1
6
134
Trip End
Dec 31, 2009
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Macau,
China
Sunday, January 11, 2009
On arrival, we had to go through customs and immigration...again. Then we didn't really know what to do. We hadn't made a plan about anything. Except I wanted to at least do a little gambling. Just to say I'd been gambling in Macau. Now when you first walk out of the ferry terminal...we were bombarded with hawkers trying to get us to go to their hotel, take their tour, play in their casino, etc. We didn't want to. But we had seen what looked like a giant ancient Chinese fort on the way into the harbour. It wasn't too far away from the port, so we decided to just walk there. (Note, if you take the stairs up to the 2nd level and use the walkway up there, there are no hawkers anywhere to be seen.)
So sure enough, the cool Chinese fort was the Babylon casino. We didn't go inside but we did take some pics by it. On the walk over, I kept seeing ads for the Zaia Cirque du Soleil show. Jacqui kept missing it and thought I was seeing things. I was thinking that if we were there, in Macau, why not go see the Cirque show! As we kept walking though, I only saw the ads for the show, and I never saw what casino it was being hosted in.
Then we arrived at the Sands Casino. It seemed like a good enough place to stop in for a little gambling and to look around. While we were in there, I asked about Zaia, and was told the performers were on holiday until Jan 21st...bummer. But then Jacqui and I walked all around the casino floor, watched a floor show at Xanadu for a while. Then I wanted to at least get a real poker chip to drill a hole in, and use it as a keychain. The lowest amount we could take out of the ATM though was HK$500, so we figured we play with that until it was gone. I went to the roulette table, and Jacqui wanted to go play some slots. I gave her $125 from my chips and she went to go cash them in.
Not being gamblers ourselves, we didn't know how this was supposed to work. I had given her "Table" chips, which when she went up to cash them out, they told her to go back to the table. So then I exchanged them into "Cashout" chips, which she got her money for. I didn't see her for a while so I was playing roulette, and doing very very poorly. Then she came back up all flustered because the machine wouldn't take her cash. I cashed out at the table and went to go see what the problem was. Ends up, she'd gotten Hong Kong Dollars (HKD), and the machines she was trying to feed them to took Macau Patacas(MOP). So we found a machine that took HKD and she sat down to play. I took my "Cashout" chips and got $50 HKD so I could play next to her until we were out. When I get back though, she's not doing half bad. I'm doing fairly poorly again, until I hit something a little bit bigger. I was so happy because all of a sudden, I'm up again. I ended up with HK$127, after putting in HK$50. So then Jacqui wants to play until she gets down to some arbitrary amount. Then BAM!!, she hits this great payout which put her up over HK$1350. We were ecstatic...especially because she only put in $100!. So then she played a little bit more until she got back to HK$1200 and we cashed out and took our money and RUN! (Don't know if these places LET you leave with more than you brought). She had a lot of fun and I was having a good time watching.
On the ferry back to Hong Kong, we were debating what to do with our windfall. Didn't figure it out until we were back at the Royal Pacific having our complimentary cocktails.
And after arriving back in Hong Kong, we realized we had more stamps put in our passports in one day than we've done in a month before. 5 stamps in one day!
