True, it's easier to get around, the water in its canals is cleaner, and the women gondoliers know to say "shukriya" in chaste Hindi, but our first tryst had proved disappointing. My son had insisted on including Macau on our itinerary, wanting a flutter at the casino tables, against which my middle-class morality had proved no match. But where were we to stay? "At the Venetian, naturally," he'd pointed out. The casino? Apparently, yes, but with a hotel and mall attached, but where neither room nor package was available for the days we intended to be there.
In Macau, it soon became evident why the gondoliers threw out Indian phrases, and the Venetian was sold out. The fake-city was overrun with Indians - Gujaratis, mostly - who sauntered down the store aisles as though they were at Chowpatty, photographing each other outside Victoria's Secret, shopping at Pull & Bear, downing their Black Labels at the only Indian outlet in the food court, and waging bets on the poker and baccarat tables in the casino where waitresses kept them in complimentary Red Label. It was Indian heaven, and as Narendra Modi's compatriots gambled away their foreign exchange, you couldn't help but feel that Diwali, outsourced to the Chinese, had come a little early.
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Having failed to procure a room at the Venetian - "thankfully", as my daughter concluded, having spent the bulk of a day and night checking out its stores and tables - we booked ourselves into "Macau's biggest" and the "world's largest" Sheraton instead, a perfect choice, as it turned out, as we were only a couple of shopping corridors away from the Venetian. For a city given to using such epithets as "largest" and "hugest" for everything from its Toys"R"Us store to the size of its hotels and jackpot tables, Macau turned out to also be reasonably sedate. True, there were the risque shows; true, too, that the converted rupee appeared anaemic at the poker tables where the high stakes had both our children renounce their player status for observer rank sooner than I'd anticipated. But it wasn't quite Las Vegas as my son had imagined it, thereafter jeering at his countrymen - and us - "for playing out your American dreams", even though he'd been the one who'd booked our side trip in the first place.
A few days previously, we'd partied at Ozone, a bar on the 118th floor of the Ritz-Carlton that dwarfs high-rise Hong Kong, but the high there had nothing on the Venetian where I, at least, had doubled my stakes - striking lucky with five games of roulette in a row - before quitting, if only to prove that the house doesn't always win. Having tasted the fruits of the latter, would I return to enticing Venetian, or choose the more enduring pleasures of Venice? The wife or the mistress? The tawdry or the traditional? Watch this space.