In Macau – for our APAC pow-wow.

Macau. Where is it, and what is it? Does the name sound familiar? I guess many of you will say it’s somewhere in China, figures large in colonial history, has its fair share of shady neighborhoods, and more than its fair share of casinos. And… you’d be right! However, I was here for neither the history, the culture, nor the gambling – but for work: our Asia-Pacific partner conference – the last in our yearly ultramarathon of regional partner conferences.

// To recap: every year we usually have several regional partner conferences:

• the global one for our most trusted partners from all over the world;
• the META one (Middle East, Turkey and Africa);
• the Americas one – albeit stripped back due to the geopolitical situation of recent years;
• “Normally” a European one – but not at all in recent years for the same geopolitical reasons;
• the Russia++ one;
• this here Asian one.

Macau = China’s Vegas, so the size of the hotels – and the conference halls inside – are predictably large and plush:

The hall’s getting prepared for the guests:

Tables are set, the speakers are rehearsed, everything’s ready to go!…

120+ partners from 15 countries made it to the conference. I quote our organizers: “from Cambodia to Korea, and from Sri Lanka to Japan” (and I’ll add India, China and Taiwan, Malaysia-Singapore-Indonesia-Vietnam-Philippines… basically almost everyone showed up!) And then it was down to business…

And the tourism, you may ask? None at all! Well, except for driving along the 55-kilometer-long Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau Bridge – that was good fun. There aren’t many places where you can take a road trip like that!

But we didn’t see much of Macau this time. The interesting stuff was closed, and we had zero free time; the best I got was the view out of my hotel window:

And inside the hotel:

We made a brief visit to a casino but didn’t stay long. I hadn’t been to a casino in around 15 years (the last time was in Vegas on a weekend between working weeks), and these days I can’t even remember which poker table is which, and all I wanted to do was sleep. We lost a little money and called it a night. But I did manage to sneak a couple of chips into my pocket as souvenirs :)

And that’s all for now folks!…