LUCK ON THE RUN

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, MANILA BULLETIN'S WEEKEND SPECIAL, EVERY FRIDAY, 25 APRIL 2008)


When in Macau, you have to decide: Are you in Venice or Las Vegas?

At the Venetian Macao Resort Hotel, you are in both, but you might as well throw in Guangzhou, if only because of its colonial touches. What a treat! That’s like three continents in a space that’s so much smaller than Metro Manila.

BLURB
Venetian Macau represents a massive paradigm shift for Macau and the future of tourism development in Asia —Sheldon Adelson, chairman and CEO, Las Vegas Sands Corp.

I have been to Macau twice before in the late ’90s, but I swear I cannot remember anything beyond the ruins of St. Paul’s. So traveling to Macau for the weekend felt so much like the very first time, especially since I was going to stay at the Venetian, which could have easily been the raison d’etre of my weekend trip.

Indeed, Venetian was on its own a destination and you have no reason to leave its premises, except that, like all the other hotels in Macau, it offers free rides to any point in the former Portuguese colony, not to mention a free ferry ride to Hong Kong.

The newer MGM Grand Macau, which opened only a few months after the grand opening of the Venetian in August last year, is one other reason to take advantage of Macau’s ride-all-you-can offer. True enough, it is grand, but not in the scale of the Venetian. Except for a gigantic replica of a flower garden in the plaza, I would say it had more subtle sensibilities. The reception area is set against a mural, actually a collection of paintings with random brushstrokes in bold colors, lit up from behind with a yellow light, so that from afar the human shadows on both sides of the counter mingle with the artwork, giving the whole arrival experience a modern, nearly Op-Art feel.

We also took a peek at Wynn Macau, if only to check out the Louis Vuitton store that I heard is selling its stuff like hotcakes. But to our surprise the show at the iconic atrium was quite a treat. I would venture to call it sculpture in motion, unraveling the mystery of the 12 animal signs of the Chinese zodiac every 15 minutes or so in a flash of gold moving to a heart-pounding tempo and reaching its climax upon the emergence of the golden tree of prosperity.

But all these megahotels pale in comparison to the Venetian Macao Resort Hotel, a megacity on its own, all 980,000 square meters of it. It is the world’s largest single structure hotel building, with 3,000 all-suite guestrooms (my favorite feature), 149,000 square meters of retail space, and over 51,000 square meters of casino floor, the largest in the world, teeming with 870 table games and over 3,400 slot machines.

It’s quite overwhelming at first, walking from, say, the main lobby to your room on the 17th floor of the South Wing, but with its Venetian theme, the hotel has made sure you need not get bored covering the distance. Indoor canals snake through the property, bearing gondolas and singing gondoliers. In one corner, a shop, whether Giordano or Armani, Rich Jade or Roberto Coin, beckons. In the next, a restaurant, whether the splendid buffet at Bambu or modern Japanese at Roka, lures the palate.

In between, such as when you find yourself in the middle of St. Mark’s Square, a violinist in a Carnivale costume plays a serenade, a living statue intrigues, a soprano takes breaths away, all under a makeshift blue sky that mimics the atmosphere of twilight as day turns into night.

But all these make up probably only less than half of the Venetian, whose second phase of development will begin upon the completion of the 4,108-room Sheraton on the Cotai Strip, a seven-hotel row within view of the Venetian’s Campanile tower, which will include big international hotel brands like Four Seasons, Shangri-La, St. Regis, and Raffles.

It’s a different world in Macau, where East meets—and literally becomes—West; where old meets new and new pretends to be old. After all, this little peninsula on the western edge of the Pearl River Delta prides itself with more than a handful of Unesco World Heritage Sites, the ruins of the St. Paul Cathedral included. But from a past brimming with riches, Macau is on a superhighway to a future even richer.

I thought I shared that future when I won the jackpot on the slot machine on the first night of my Macau weekend. But then it was only my first night and it was way too early to press on the “collect” button.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com