Part 1: Where is Macau Anyway and Why Was I There

A trip seemed in order. Having been in Thailand for about a month with almost no job and not whole lot of direction, I needed to do something to kick start my life again. Megan had a break in late October and she was planning on going to Cambodia but for whatever reason, I just wasn't that interested in going to Cambodia right now.
Then I heard about the right trip. A friend of mine, Muad, has been training for the last 5 months to compete in difficulty climbing at the Asian Indoor Games in Macau. Macau you say? Now here is a city that I have heard of... I think... but seems like a place I might want to go. [Inside the Ventian Casino] So what is Macau? My first guess was that it is somewhere in SE Asia, but up to about 3 weeks ago, that is about as much as I could have told you. Well, since you are obviously curious now I will tell you that it is a 1 hour boat ride away from Hong Kong and is an island just off the coast of Southern China. It was colonized by the Portuguese way back when (in fact I think it was the first place to be colonized in Asia) and still holds a lot of European charm mixed with a touch of Chinese chaos. It would still be a nice lazy fishing city with a little commerce if it weren't for the fact that in 1980 it was opened up to gambling. Now it is a quaint Euro/Asia city with a major dosage of Las Vegas thrown right in the middle. It actually earns more gambling revenue than any other gambling city in the entire world, Las Vegas included. Because the international climbing community is small, and because there is a great community developed in Macau/ Hong Kong, I hooked up with a Macau climber, Christine, who works as a flight attendant for the private jet owned by the Venetian in Macau. Christine told me that the guy who owns The Venetian makes more money in one year from just his one property in Macau than all three of his properties in Vegas combined. And these aren't small properties. I was told by someone in Hong Kong (none of this is verifiable) that the Venetian Macau is the largest building (I'm guessing floor space) in the world. The Sands Casino in Macau payed for itself, it actually payed off the entire building, after it was open for only one year. The who city is nuts and you can damn well believe that it is going to grow like you have never seen in the coming years. There is a lot of money to made by taking poor sucker's money. Anybody want to open a Casino with me?

[Muad and Kat watching the speed climbing competition] Besides walking around town and pretty much digging the mixes of cultures, eating killer chinese noodles, fantastic portuguese clams, and wowing at the absolutely over-the-top architecture of the Casinos, I spent a lot of time at the Macau University for Science and Technology. More specifically at their brand new gym which holds a brand new 18 meter massively overhanging modular climbing wall. Pretty cool structure and one I would have like to climb on except that I couldn't because the Asia Indoor Games had their climbing comp going on. This is kind of like the olympics except that it is just for Asian countries. Competitors came from Iran, Indonesia, Mongolia, Korea, Khazikstan, and Thailand to name a few. It felt cool to sit between the Iranian team and the Malysian team rooting on a climber from Japan. Muad didn't do too well, he fell off low on the first round because his hand slipped of a hold as he was trying to do a hand/ foot match. [Muad on the comp route} He really shouldn't have fallen, but it was just one of those things that happens when you are climbing. You never know when you can just slip off. However it was fun to watch a comp and see the different abilities of these guys trying to onsite some pretty cool routes.

Then it was off to Hong Kong