Macau--The Bus Tour

First off, the bus tour!

Okay, it wasn't really a bus tour. We got on one of those hop on, hop off buses that covered most of the city. But I did have some fun snapping pictures from the upper deck!

Warning in advance, though: I'm writing this more than a year after I visited, and since we didn't set foot in any of these buildings, I only vaguely remember what they were. I tried to do some extra internet searching to refresh my memory, but as it turns out, some of these are hard to find. If I could find the place, I linked to it in the caption; if not... well, you can go there yourself and correct me if I'm wrong!

This, if I remember correctly, was a food court. But look at those buildings! They could be from the 17th century Caribbean. 

I think this was a shopping center... I definitely remember this being similar to something in Portsmouth, where it used to be a place of massive industrial shipping but is now a place of leisure. 

Interestingly enough Macau is named after a goddess, but it isn't this goddess. This is the Kun Iam Statue, and the woman is one of the goddesses of mercy. Interestingly, according to one reviewer at TripAdvisor (the second one if you scroll down), her name is also spelled Guan Yin or Kwan Yin (that "k" is Cantonese and not Mandarin). 

Macau is cut in half by the ocean. There are several massive bridges that connect the two parts. 

This is a temple to A Ma, the goddess of fishermen and sailors, and it is probably who Macau is named after. I remember the automated tour guide saying something like this: the Portuguese tried to ask what the area was called, and the locals thought they were asking who the goddess was, so the names got confused. 

The temple from the back. I just love the Portuguese building in front of the Chinese temple.

A few of the bridges spanning the two parts of Macau.

We got a bit of rain. Still, these clouds were lovely.

Yeah, no, I don't remember what this is.

A statue of the leader of the first Portuguese settlers. 

This is so Macau. 

As I was adding these pictures, I realized something else: Google photos dated all my pictures by US time, and the dates in the US changed while we were in Macau. So the photos at the end were actually the first photos, time-wise. But I'm not going to rearrange them now--Blogspot just updated to a new layout that is getting right under my skin.

See you in the next post!