The Venetian Macao

The Venetian Macao offers visitors to enjoy the majestic and luxurious Venetian complex. This is an entertainment complex built on artificial canals with many stylised buildings and bridges. Complementing the Venetian entourage are gondolas that ply the canals.

Fun facts about the hotel:

around 4,000 slot machines – classic one-armed bandits;

several hundred slot machines with popular attractions: roulette, baccarat, poker, blackjack

30 restaurants, conference rooms, shops;

a concert hall with a capacity of 15,000 spectators.

No strict dress code requirements apply to players when they visit the casino. Modern security measures are in place, including cameras and metal detectors.

Bellagio – casino

Travelling to a casino is traditionally associated with a visit to the iconic Las Vegas, USA. The Bellagio complex is a monstrous building which houses gambling halls, premium hotel rooms, and luxury restaurants. The casino has been in operation since 1998 with the pompous opening of the establishment, which cost $88 million.

Several thousand slot machines – classic and adapted – are available. Roulette, poker and craps can be played. Additional services include a theatre, conservatory and spa area. When visiting the city of Las Vegas, many gambling enthusiasts visit the Bellagio.

Casino de Monte-Carlo

The Casino de Monte Carlo is a unique, atmospheric entertainment complex. The casino was chosen to house the former museum building on which the legendary Charles Garnier worked. Upon entering the museum complex, the visitor enters the so-called ‘atrium’. Also of note is the Garnier hall with its chic colonnade and valuable works of art.

Access to the casino is regulated. You must present your passport to an employee, pay for admission and keep your personal belongings for safekeeping. The dress code is strict, but you may come in loose jeans. Only persons over the age of 21 will be allowed to play at the club.

Players may play classic slot games, take slots for roulette, blackjack and poker. The process is monitored by the administration, with security cameras installed. Trained dealers handle the players.

Atlantis Casino Resort.

A luxury resort located in Reno, United States. The hotel first welcomed guests in 1991. Not only do visitors have access to the gaming rooms, but they also have the option to stay in one of the 1,000 stylized rooms. Dozens of exchange offices, storage facilities and safes are available on site.

The staff is competent and fluent in English, French and German. Rooms are air-conditioned, with large beds and carpeted flooring. There are several hundred machines in the gaming area, and you can play classic entertainments or spend your leisure time at the bar.

Crown Casino and Entertainment Complex

The resort complex is located in Western Australia. Established in 1985 with successive conversions and expansions. Distinctive in that it consists of three unique hotels with a total of 1200 rooms. Several dozen luxury restaurants, nightclubs and a casino are available.

Players and guests at the entertainment centre can enjoy the casino 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are no strict requirements when visiting the club. At the disposal of the guests:

Approximately 2,400 slot machines with coin-operated machines;

Entertainment: Keno, poker, marbles, dice, dominoes;

Baccarat, Roulette, Blackjack and Three Card Poker may be played.

The history of the hotel complex as a casino centre is linked to a consistent expansion. Since 2012, the administration has been working to increase the number of land-based slots, which has been encouraged by the government, represented by the state’s prime minister. Progress is also being made on the construction of new gaming halls, hotels, entertainment areas, restaurants and bars.

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And no wonder, because there is so much to see here: beautiful landscapes, historical sites, modern buildings and developed entertainment (restaurants, casinos, amusement parks).

Each state has its own unique attractions. Before planning your trip to America, you may wish to explore local attractions in order to choose the state you’ll be most interested in.

1) New York

New York is one of the biggest cities in the USA! Founded in 1664, the metropolis has been growing ever since, with skyscrapers being actively built here.

Central Park is one of the largest and most popular places in the world, dating back to the 19th century! It is about 4 kilometres long, 800 metres wide and 3.41 square kilometres. The park has several artificial lakes, two ice rinks, wilderness areas where sports competitions take place and even a zoo! Of course, not to forget the Statue of Liberty, a sculpture created in the 19th century! It’s 107 meters high!

The city is also famous among foreigners for its cinematography. Popular TV series as well as legendary films were shot in New York:

– Breakfast at Tiffany’s;

– “A Rainy Day in New York”;

– The Devil Wears Prada;

– “Brooklyn.”

– What Women Want;

– “Home Alone 2”.

2) Miami

It’s a famous resort city on the Florida peninsula with perpetual summer and great beaches.

Visitors will be able to relax alone with nature by visiting:

– The Tropical Zoo, one of the largest zoos in Florida with over 3,000 animals in 2,995 km². The zoo is divided into four zones: Asia, Africa, the Amazon and Australia. The best month to visit because of the climatic conditions is May.

– Jungle Island is home to exclusive animals. Tours include spectacular shows, beautiful waterfalls and landscapes.

The Miami Aquarium opened in 1955. Thousands of people come every year to watch the mammal performances. The “oldest star” is the orca Lolita, who has been performing since 1970.

Of course, Miami’s calling card is the ocean. Aside from regular swimming, water sports like surfing, windsurfing and kitesurfing are popular.

A wide choice of hotels allows you to book a room according to your income: from budget options to VIP suites.

3) Los Angeles

Los Angeles encompasses a large land and ocean area, so it simply can’t go unnoticed.

The local pride is the “HOLLYWOOD” monument, large white letters created in 1932. The architecture was due to be dismantled in a year and a half, but has been a joy to behold for centuries. Hollywood, the district of Los Angeles, is known as the symbolic capital of cinema. Best-selling films are shot in the pavilions and given awards at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, and there is also a home on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The resort is also famous for its busy nightlife: parties, restaurants and nightclubs. However, there’s plenty to do during the daytime too:

– Los Angeles County Museum of Art;

– the Hollywood Bowl architecture;

– the Santa Monica Pier;

– the Grand Central Market, etc.

4) Las Vegas

Over 50 million tourists from all over the world visit the resort city every year! Many people associate Las Vegas with entertainment, and it is, because much of the city’s revenue comes from the entertainment industry:

– 80+ casinos with arcade machines;

– thousands of gaming pavilions;

– comfortable hotels for guests.

The first gambling establishments began to be built in the 1930s when the local authorities realised that gambling could bring in a legal income. So year after year, other clubs and complexes sprang up. Las Vegas Casino, Casino Flamingo, Marina Hotel & Casino were the first casinos and complexes where visitors relaxed and bet. Infrastructure construction peaked in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to this day. There are exciting events every day, so tourists won’t get bored!

The amazing thing is that the entertainment centre was literally built on a desert site!

5) Chicago

With a population of over 10 million people, this city is the third most populous in the United States. Many people associate Chicago with skyscrapers and gangsters, a fact that’s a credit to the film industry.

Some viewers recognise the streets and neighbourhoods of the metropolis from legendary films: “Home Alone”, “The Dark Knight (2008)”, “Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon”, “The Chicago Gang” and others.

The 108-storey Willis Tower is one of the most prominent buildings in the city. The city is home to the Grant Park complex, located on the shores of Lake Michigan. It covers an area of 1.29 square kilometres. There are quite a few landmarks in the area:

– Millennium Park;

– Buckingham Fountain, one of the largest in the world;

– Chicago Institute of Arts.

You may also visit Chicago:

– Museum of Science and Industry;

– Lincoln Park Zoo;;

– John Shedd Aquarium.

In addition, there are well-developed beaches on the shores of Lake Michigan.

The price of a vacation is more affordable than in other places – another incentive to come here.

6) San Francisco

The history of the metropolis goes back to 1776.

Located on the northern coast of the United States, it is a tourist destination with a Mediterranean climate.

It was famous for its Chinatown, which was frequented by Hollywood stars as far back as the middle of the last century. Chinese refugees who rebuilt their homes themselves created a unique neighbourhood. There are museums and cultural centres too. A popular street is Lombard Street, a 180-metre walkway with a steep hill.

There are quite a few tourist trams running around the city, which you can hop on to get a guided sightseeing tour. Tourists love to take pictures against the backdrop of the area. Fans of beautiful architecture should stop by Grace Cathedral, which is Gothic in style and looks like Notre Dame.

Visitors will immediately be able to see the bronze doors of the architecture called ‘Gates of Paradise’. The entrance is accessible to people of all faiths. Come and see the wonderful sights of the United States!

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All the worry about whether or not we would survive in Japan on our budget decided to begin after we bought the tickets and arranged the visa. There was no time to think: the idea of combining part of my trip with my partner’s longtime dream of going to Japan came to us spontaneously, when I was just days away from my departure.

The list of tips for saving money in the top 10 most expensive countries in the world didn’t inspire optimism, for it started like this: “First, buy a pass for ¥29,110 a week…”.

In another article, the author, reasoning about the approximate cost of traveling in Japan, came to the following conclusion: at a budget of $ 200 per day will be fine here, for $ 100 you will experience some inconvenience, and if you limit yourself in everything, sleep in the cheapest places, not to “feed your sushi addiction” and visit only free attractions, can settle for $ 50 a day. “But obviously, a cheap $20-a-day Asian country Japan will never be,” he concluded.

We had no choice but to accept the challenge: We were going to spend almost a month in Japan, spending no more than $15 a day per person. Budgeting for the trip was both a necessity and a principle: I am forced to travel cheaply, because I quit my unloved job long ago and have no idea when and who I will work next. On the other hand, artificial restrictions often make things more interesting.

How and what did I save money on?

There are no surprises with the main savings points: hitchhiking and tenting. Japan has incredibly expensive transportation, the prices of which make even visitors from non-poor countries like Great Britain cringe, and incredibly expensive housing. Trying to use either would have meant going instantly over budget, so we just gave up on the idea of using them.

Tent

Discovery one: Japan is probably almost the most comfortable country in the world to travel with a tent. It is not forbidden to put it even in the middle of the city park. That’s usually where we spent the night – we just looked for the nearest park on the maps. If the Japanese experienced some cultural shock from finding a tent in unexpected places, then their upbringing definitely dictated that they should hide it: the reaction to such things was along the lines of “what by definition should not be there, I just don’t notice. Besides, they themselves often set up tents in the parks during the day, when they relax there on weekends with their children.

So, two-thirds of the time we slept in the tent.

Hitchhiking

It’s neither bad nor good in Japan, it just has its own peculiarities. It’s not the best way to get around if you’re coming here for a short time: if you don’t have much time and a lot of money, you’ll get around faster with a JR Pass, even if it’s more boring.

Cities often stretch on endlessly, the development of one city flows smoothly into another with no visible boundaries, so that the classic stand at the exit of the track, there are some difficulties. At first we didn’t quite understand how to deal with it: we started to stop right in the middle of the cities, redrawing the hieroglyphs with the names of destinations on cardboard – and it worked. Later it was found out by experience that it works best to stop in the parking lots of convenience stores (chain supermarkets like 7-Eleven, FamilyMart and Lawson) – “traffic” there is high, and the drivers just have time to take a closer look at you, realize what’s going on, and think about whether they want to have guests today.

Cars usually do not stop very often (average wait time – 30-60 minutes), but we quickly realized that this is not because we do not want to help, but just the opposite – want to help too much. This nation – true professionals in the art of creating a comfortable atmosphere around the interlocutor, and it is felt in any communication with them. True, sometimes in this art they go too far: you want, as usual, to spend the night in the park and run on, but in the morning you find yourself in someone else’s house in the state pirozhochki stuffed with dinner with sushi and two breakfasts. And you don’t feel like going anywhere.

Loading in another car almost every time caused a feeling that we were guests here, and we are dear and welcome, and never Japanese hitchhiking was not like the transfer of our carcasses from point A, where we were picked up at, to point B, where we and the driver of the paths diverge. The upbringing does not allow the Japanese to leave a person at a random point on the road. They constantly took us off the path they wanted, drove us as close to our desired destination as possible, and generally injected us with shocking doses of kaii by any available means. Weak attempts to change their minds and tell them that we could be left anywhere were not taken into account. To be taken without warning for 50 km instead of 10 km, which were on our way was a usual story.

Highways

Highways, toll highways, are another matter. The country is riddled with them, and it is highly recommended to use them when traveling long distances.

The recipe is simple: service area (SA) and parking area (PA). SAs are large parking lots for rest stops along the way – with stores and restrooms, and sometimes entire shopping centers. PA’s are the same but more modest and are best avoided if you have a choice, as they can be very dull. They are found on any highway usually every 10-30 km, in pairs in each direction. Stopping with a sign near the exit from them is the best way to get far. Drivers will be sympathetic to a request to leave you at any of the following SAs. Google maps don’t always find them through search, it makes sense to manually look at the map along the route at a sufficient scale. SAs/PAs close to towns are usually easy to get to on foot from outside, no problem with that.

If there’s no SA/PA nearby, and it’s a long drive, it’s best to try to get on the free trail to the nearest service area. Stopping in front of the toll booth to get out on the toll road is pretty useless: the driver would have to break the rules to stop and pick you up, and Japanese people who are willing to do that are extremely rare.

It’s not worth trying to get out on the highway in a random place – we checked it out when we were desperate to get out of one rotten town by other means.

Sleepovers

Hitchhiking in Japan, as the best means of making intercultural contact, brought us some amazing evenings with locals who invited us to stay overnight. What we didn’t expect from a country famous for its number of socially unadapted elements was that it would be close to the level of Georgia on the hospitality scale.

They constantly bought us food for the road and treated us to lunch a couple of times. We visited three Japanese homes of varying levels of affluence, spending evenings talking to the families who signed us in, and one of our drivers took us to a traditional Japanese-style hotel altogether, putting us in front of the fact that he had already paid for it. We got a sneak peek at the amount he paid for us – 7,000¥. I guess this event was just necessary to restore the balance of karma right after seven hours of hitchhiking mishaps.

Hygiene

The Japanese are known for their sensitive attitude to the topic of toilets. You won’t be without free public toilets under any circumstances: they are in absolutely every supermarket, including the ubiquitous 7-Eleven, in any park, just meet regularly in the street.

The answer to the question of how to be homeless with a tent for weeks and not resemble a homeless person is in the toilets. No, they don’t have showers. But the freestanding toilets, which are usually found in parks, have three entrances: M, G and for the disabled. The last one is especially interesting because it usually has a lot of space and can be closed from the inside. This allows you to fully undress and perform all the necessary hygiene procedures, including washing your head by pouring water from the sink. The main thing is not to confuse the flush button with the button to call the assistant, or else he will come.

Food

The only item we didn’t want to save as hard as the others.

At first the prices are demotivating: to find some plate of noodles for 700¥ is already not bad. We tried to eat at 7-Eleven, but realized that most of the prepared food sold there is not only expensive, but also completely pointless, i.e. not nutritious. Anyway, I’ll skip our brief period of creative exploration and move on to the tipsters.

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I’ve managed to participate in 26 volunteer projects on three continents, and I consider volunteering to be one of the highest quality ways to travel on a budget. Hence the article – detailed, honest and subjective.

What kind of “volunteering” are we talking about?

The word “volunteerism” has many meanings, but this article will be purely about sharing experiences and knowledge. That means I will not be referring to social or highly specialized volunteering – helping orphans, supporting the community during natural disasters, or cleaning up trash in the yard. Those are also good topics, but they have little to do with travel.

So here goes: volunteering is about exchanging your time and skills for lodging, experiences, and varied experiences.

Volunteering as a sharing experience

In my opinion, this is an ideal case. There is a host who needs help, and there is a traveler who is willing to provide it. Help can be absolutely anything: from painting a house to feeding cheetahs, from harvesting crops to drinking alcohol together in a Muslim country. There are projects in almost all the countries available to visit; in some you can count them on the fingers, but in others you have to choose from three thousand options.

More often than not, a volunteer is not expected to help for a few hours a day, but rather to be involved in the process, to communicate and share knowledge. If a person comes to build a house, does it diligently and skillfully throughout the day, and the rest of the time sits in his room, distracted only by food, his presence on the project is unlikely to please a good host.

What do the projects provide?

Most of the time we are provided with lodging and food, but this is variable. For example, in Uganda we lived in a tent and were fed only beans, bananas, and a tasteless mass of corn powder. In Italy we had our own cottage, and the luxurious four meals a day made us noticeably bloated, with the hostess not repeating her dishes once in two weeks.

At first glance, it might seem that the poorer the country, the worse the living conditions will be, but that is not the case. In France we were starving and always freezing in an unheated house on wheels, and the Philippines for three weeks were high in a private house in the middle of the mountains, cooking his own food, which were bought on our list. So it all depends solely on the host and the type of work.

Somewhere only accommodation is provided and a volunteer buys food by himself, somewhere the cost of food is divided between all the volunteers and the host itself, somewhere the conditions are comparable to the best resort in the world, and somewhere you don’t want to stay for a day. And yet, the experience of the project almost always depends on the host.

If the host is cool, even modest conditions are of secondary importance. Class is not only determined by the nature of the person, but also the interest in volunteers: a good host is not just feeding and housing. He shares information about the country, recommends places to visit, and sometimes takes you there himself.

Types of volunteer projects

There are over 36,000 projects on the Workaway alone, and not all of them are interesting, mutually beneficial, or even free. It all depends on the country or the individual/organization. Some people really need help, some yearn for free labor, and some even try to earn money by volunteering. The latter is especially true in developing countries, such as those in Africa.

To understand what to expect from a project, you need to read the information on the host page very carefully. More often than not, people with serious convictions write about them in the first lines: neither they nor the volunteer will be comfortable if their life positions are diametrically opposed.

The pitfalls of volunteering

Fortunately, there aren’t many of these. If you carefully read the descriptions and reviews for each project, the chance of running into trouble is close to zero. Still, there are a couple of things to consider.

Of the 26 volunteer projects I have participated in, only two have had truly negative experiences: one on religious grounds and one on ethnic grounds. In both cases, both sides were wrong. The hosts were wrong in their intolerance; we were wrong in our unwillingness to tolerate their intolerance. Of course, a host would not write in the project description, “I make volunteers pray before they eat and read the Bible out loud whether they want to or not,” or “My husband hates Russians.” And negative experiences are not often described in reviews. So no one is immune from such surprises, and the best thing to do in this case – quickly bid farewell.

The other “stones” are minor and obvious: the constant communication is exhausting, the rules of another’s home sometimes seem wild, and with some people you just can not get along. In all of these cases, it’s important to remember that this is just an experience, and no one is forcing you to live here. If you don’t like it, leave.

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