Betcha you can’t read that without humming the Village People’s disco version. The YMCA was a 4 star hotel and reasonably priced. The Salisbury YMCA was also right next to the 5 star Peninsula Hotel, a very ritzy and famous old hotel in Hong Kong. It was a great location, right across the street from the harbor. We could see the night light show from our room every night. You were within walking distance of Nathan Rd (shopping jackpot), Star Ferry, Hard Rock Café, and a bunch of metro stations. The only weird thing about the hotel is that they had such a large pool that the whole lobby smelled like a chlorinated pool. For someone that enjoys swimming like me, it brought back good memories of my summers life guarding (and when I could still wear a bikini). First day in HK we took one of those cheesy city tours. We saw Victoria Peak, Stanley Market, Aberdeen and took ride in a sanpan. That night we took the Star Ferry night tour of the Hong Kong Harbor.
With all the official sightseeing out of the way the next day we took the hydrofoil to Macau Island. We were expecting some quaint Portuguese village with a couple of new casinos thrown in. Boy, were we wrong. It was a huge, crowded city with lots of Chinese casinos, the Sands Casino and the Wynn Casino. The casinos didn’t have many slot machines the majority of the floor space was taken up with the table games, most of which I had never seen before. The slots that we did find had some interesting differences. Instead of the “Lucky Sevens” slot machines there were “Lucky Eights”. Instead of card faces they showed mahjong tiles and of course there were a lot of dragon themed slots. We made a big point of changing our HK dollars to the Macau dollars when we arrived and found out later that you couldn’t use them in the Casinos. We went to the center of town to see the original Portuguese village – but all that was left was a front wall of a church and a fort. We had a real hard time finding a taxi back to the boat.
After we got back to Hong Kong we spotted a Mrs. Sees candy store. If you have never been west of the Mississippi and had Mrs. Sees you have missed a real chocolate treat. We refuse to tell how much we spent there. YUM ! We had dinner at the Hard Rock Café, which was not very busy. Most of the customers were foreigners, our waiter was lousy but the food was great! We shopped in their famous t-shirt store and walked back to the YMCA. Next morning Cathy me left for her Hawaiian cruise and I braved the Hong Kong Metro and went to Disneyland.
