Venetian Macao

After dim sum on Monday we decided to make an impromptu trip to the Venetian in Macau.  My hip was still bothering me, so we figured this would be a less walk intensive day so I could recover a bit.  Macau is the second special administrative region of the Republic of China (with Hong Kong being the other one).  The Venetian hotel and casino was of a particular interest to us, so we took a one hour ferry ride straight to the hotel (well there was a short bus ride to the hotel from the port) and spent the rest of the day there.  Fun facts about the Venetian Macao (from Wikipedia)…

•  The 10,500,000-square-foot Venetian Macao is modeled after its sister casino resort – the The Venetianin Las Vegas – and is the largest single structure hotel building in Asia and the 4th-largest building in the world by area.  [The 1st largest building in the world in the Dammam airport in Saudi Arabia, the 2nd is the Aalsmeer Flower Auction in the Netherlands, and the 3rd largest is terminal 3 of the Beijing International Airport]  This thing is bigger than airport terminals!!!
• The main hotel tower was finished in July 2007 and the resort officially opened on August 28, 2007.  The resort has the largest casino space in the world with 550,000 square feet, 3400 slot machines and 800 gambling tables), 3000 suites and a 15,000 seat arena for entertainment/sports events.

And of course similar to Hong Kong the place has lots of lots of shopping (here is a link to just shops at the Venetian hotel!!!!) + there is more high end shops at the Four Seasons (attached to the Venetian).

So the plan was to do a little gambling, a little shopping (or at least window shopping) and go to a cirque de soleil show, Zaia, at night.  Sounds like fun, right?  

I had a 100 calorie chocolate bar on the ferry there…

And upon arrival at the Venetian had the best taro green tea with milk bubble tea.  Yum!  Love the purple color!!  

My husband had a Macao beer

The Venetian is really beautiful.  We thought it was fun that we’ve been to the original casino in Vegas and of course Venice in Italy!

That’s one of the bathrooms… they all had gold framed mirrors.  Very fancy!

Then we got a little hungry and got a few snacks.  What you see here is a bunch of delicious looking buns with pork and chicken.  Unfortunately they were all filled with onions and I almost gagged after trying one of them.  Eww eww eww.  I hate onions!!!

So the only way I knew to get rid of the onion taste in my mouth is to get something sweet.  I got this “mango pancake” – at least that’s what the sign said.  This did not resemble pancakes at all, but was still pretty good (and better than onion filled pastries!!).

It had kind of like whipped cream inside with a few bits of mango.  I wished there was more mango there.  I ate one of these balls and shared most of the other one with Adam.  He loved them

And then we realized I still hadn’t had any alcoholic drinks on the vacation.  That had to be remedied.  We went to a bar  I had a few cashews…

Tried the mango bellini tini, but it was nasty.

So I had my husband’s white wine instead.  Actually I didn’t feel like that either, so I only had a few sips.

After a little bit of gambling and a whole lot of window shopping (the place was HUGE!!!) we decided to have a quick dinner at the food court.  Oh did I mention that Zaia was off on Mondays?  Boo!!!  I was so sad because we were really looking forward to the show.  I guess we’ll have to see it next time we’re in Hong Kong

Here is where Adam got his dinner.  He really wanted to get some hanging goose…

I had a bite of this (Adam’s goose above) but it was filled with bones and I didn’t much care for the sauce.  He liked it.  I got a Korean noodle dish… and it completely inedible.  It smelled foul the second I got it so I was apprehensive.  I took a tiny bite and threw the rest away immediately.  I really hate wasting food so it was hard, but seriously I could not stomach this thing.  This was the first (and only thing so far) on this trip that I thought was truly disgusting (sorry if any of you are Korean and love this dish!).

So I went to a different vendor and got beef stir fry with noodles.  It still had onions (no one here knows the world “onions” when I ask) but I could pick them out and ate about 1/2 of this dish.

 

And that was my food for the day.  We had a really fun time but next time, we’ll definitely check the schedule for Zaia before we go!  There are also a bunch of other casinos, restaurants and museums on the other side of Macao so we’d probably explore there as well.

We’re off to check out from our hotel.  Only 1/2 day left here in Hong Kong.  So sad.  We really really love it here!  Seriously, we kind of want to move here!  But that’s ok, we are arriving in Singapore at midnight.  I have a feeling we’ll really love it there too!  See you later, bloggies.  I hope we have wireless in our hotel in Singapore (I think we should).