Day three, my final day in Macau, turned out a little differently than I had originally planned, but also much better than it would have been otherwise. I made a trip to the A Ma Temple, from which Macau draws its name. The temple itself was not as impressive as I had expected. In fact, it reminded me of a putt-putt golf course more than anything else. Here I struck up a conversation with a nice German fellow who wanted me to snap a picture of him. While we were talking, we were joined by a group of English blokes who were glad to hear some other English speakers (as was I!). We got to talking for a long time and they finally invited me to spend the day with them. We had lunch and visited a few of the sites, including the Moorish Barracks, the Leal Senado (again... but they hadn't seen it yet), and a few of the casinos, which I hadn't been into at all. That evening we went to Pizza Hut of all places. As lame as it sounds, I was eager to have REAL pizza, and that Meat Lover's pizza with the stuffed crust was just what I needed!
After dinner we had to part, and I was feeling a little blue because I really liked these guys and was vaguely toying with the idea of delaying my departure so I could hang out with them some more. After being alone in freezing cold Shaoyang for weeks with all the other Westerners gone and only my Chinese friends Phenix and Summer to see only while helping them out, I was really missing some cultural companionship! But finally I decided it would probably be too much trouble and reluctantly decided to leave as planned.
I woke up at 5AM the next day. The border opens at 7AM, and I had to take a 45 minute cab ride to get to the airport to make my 9:05AM flight. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I was afraid if it took as long to get back into China as it took to leave I was going to be cutting it very close time wise. I was at the border by 6:30AM and had time to wait. There weren't many people there, so I positioned myself fairly close to the gate into the port authority building. But as 7AM approached, suddenly there were hundreds, if not over a thousand people surrounding me. At exactly 7AM on the dot, the guards opened the gate, and people were LITERALLY crawling under the gate when it was only inches off the ground. I found myself in the novel and exhilarating experience of running towards a border as part of a crowd carrying all my worldly possessions on my back and in my hands. I admit, I felt a little like a refugee in a movie.
I found I needn't have worried about timing. There were no foreigners crossing the border at this time, and the line designated for non-Chinese/Macanese/Hong Kong residents was empty. In going through BOTH the Macau and PRC immigration lines, I was done in 13 minutes. This was a pleasing contrast to the hour and a half it took upon my arrival. I made it to the airport in plenty of time and the trip home was relatively uneventful, aside from the now-typical "foreigner in China" travel headaches I have come to expect, and even those were minor.
Back to Shaoyang!
No comments:
Post a Comment