Viewed through the prism of Asia's economic boom, it was tempting to see the opening of the world's biggest casino in Macau as another in the region's series of mileposts over recent months.
To Las Vegas Sands Corp - the US gaming group that has placed its bets on a continuing gambling boom in Macau like no other company - "failure" is the word that dare not be spoken.
The Venetian is only one leg of a much larger development called The Cotai Strip upon which the regional fortunes of many of the world's largest casino operators will depend. Having already surpassed the Las Vegas Strip by gambling revenues last year, Macau's long-term aim is to knock its American rival into the desert dust.
Last weekend, I became a small ingredient of Sheldon Adelson's (the boss of Las Vegas Sands) vision with an evening in the Venetian in the former Portugese colony, which I'd wager is about as physically monstrous a monument to people's desire to spend money as exists anywhere (that's the casino I'm talking about, not Macau itself).
It hardly makes for a statistically dependable survey, but my voyage into gambling nirvana left me unconvinced - and that was after a profitable poker session.
Unopened luxury goods boutiques and deserted walkways, two-thirds empty restaurants and hundreds of forlorn-looking gaming tables certainly aren't everyone's idea of the Vegas dream made Asian.
At least I was one of the few punters to have emerged from the doors of the casino industry's latest theme park with both my shirt and my pride intact.
And there was also the unlikely figure of a Canto-pop singer from the north of England to provide some amusement value.
But underwhelmed gamblers aren't the only thing Adelson has to worry about. Last week, he was forced to abandon a new ferry service he had set up between Hong Kong and Macau because of a legal challenge from the existing operator. Could Macau's Venetian be heading the same way as Venice itself?
Ferries aside, conflict has been a feature of life closer to my adopted home as well - quite literally.
Hong Kong's soaring property market has long been a subject for dinner-party conversation, but rarely has the debate taken on quite the feverish tone of the past couple of weeks.
For that, you can blame Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley. Both firms have signed multi-million-dollar leases to rent space in the International Commerce Centre, a new flagship office development.
At 118 storeys, it will be Hong Kong's tallest building when it is completed in 2010, but in most other respects it promises to be much like every other high-rise here.
Bar one: it's on the "wrong" side of the water. Both investment banks have struck long-term deals that analysts reckon will save each of them millions of (US) dollars annually.
That news will be well received among those responsible for cost savings at two of the firms worst hit by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. But it seems to have gone down less well among the highly paid employees, who now face a daily each-way journey into work of 20 minutes or more.
To put their new "commute" into context, many bankers live just an escalator ride from their office in Exchange Square, the largest hub of commercial activity in Hong Kong. Now they are staring at the equivalent of a journey between Oxford Street and Charing Cross, or Cannon Street and Blackfriars.
Notwithstanding the fact that working on the other side of Hong Kong harbour will afford a daily view that ranks among the world's most spectacular, the new burden hardly seems worth complaining about. |
