I've just booked a room in the Lisboa Hotel in Macau for December 19th. And I had to pay in advance to stay on that particular day in the famous landmark hotel-casino which is topped by a crown of iron curlicues and what appears to be a giant pin cushion.
This is only the second time I have been asked to pay a hotel bill in advance anywhere in Asia. The first was when Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997. Then the hoteliers demanded money several months in advance and raised their prices. This rebounded on them in the end as they deterred many potential clients and it turned out there were plenty of rooms going begging on the night.
Now that Macau is set to return to China on December 19th, I wonder if I'm making the same mistake in coughing up once more, long before I arrive in town with my laptop.
There's no great excitement about the return of Macau to the motherland after 442 years of Portuguese rule, even if it is the last bit of colonial Europe left on the Chinese mainland. It seems the event will be a footnote to history rather than a great occasion like the return of Hong Kong, which filled the world's newspapers with comment and analysis for months.
There will, of course, be no shortage of festivities. On the night of December 19th residents will stage artistic performances in public places, and there will be wonderful fireworks. On the first day of "liberation", over 10,000 people will take part in a parade with lion dancing and dragon dancing.
But it will not be the great political spectacular of the year, and many Chinese people will be saving their money and spare time to celebrate the millennium. Nor is there here any agonised debate over democracy and free speech in Macau as there was in Hong Kong. Macau has no big pro-democracy movement and never had a Chris Patten to stir things up.
Unlike Britain, Portugal actually tried to give Macau back in 1974 when it was divesting itself of its colonial assets, including East Timor, in the aftermath of revolution in Lisbon, and it has been just administering rather than running the colony ever since. With a population of less than half a million, Macau is also too small to compete with Hong Kong as a global finance centre, so its fate is of less concern to the international community.
The last Portuguese governor-general, Vasco Rocha Vieira, will depart for Europe precisely as the figures on the special electronic countdown clocks in Chinese cities twitch towards midnight on the appointed day. (Why the 19th? you might ask. No particular reason. Portugal was meant to stay right to the end of 1999, but China wanted to tidy up all the ex-colonial business in good time for the new millennium and the date was brought forward).
As Asia's very last colonial governor disappears over the horizon, a 44-year-old Canadian-educated Chinese bank manager, Edmund Ho Hau-wah, will leave his job at the family-owned Tai Fung Bank and move into the rose-pink Government Palace on Praia Grande Bay.
From this two-storey, pillared villa built by a 19th-century Portuguese baron, he will preside over what will become the Special Administrative Region of Macau. Like his Hong Kong counterpart, Mr Tung Chee-hwa, Mr Ho is a prominent businessman; he is a member of countless boards including Air Macau, the international airport and the TV and radio stations.
After the handover ceremony, life will go on much as usual, as Macau like Hong Kong has been allowed to keep its capitalist ways for 50 years under China's one-country-two-systems policy. That means the glazed-eyed gamblers can return to the main business at the Lisboa; the high rollers to the private card and roulette rooms upstairs and the small fry (like me) to the slot machines on the ground floor.
Gambling, along with the garment industry and real estate, is the biggest money-spinner in the tiny peninsula in the South China Sea, providing 60 per cent of tax revenue last year.
The new regime's big concern is to stem the gang violence which arises mostly from gambling and which has seen three dozen murders this year on the streets of Macau. Otherwise the little enclave could become marginalised as tourists and investors stay away.
This decline could accelerate if Hong Kong, which already has two race tracks and numerous lottery centres, decides to legalise casino gambling to revive its tourism trade, a possibility raised by Hong Kong's Financial Secretary, Mr Donald Tsang, who visited Las Vegas this month to study the financial, political and social implications of a Hong Kong "Lisboa".
Such a development would be particularly bad news for a Macau big-shot, Mr Stanley Ho, and his associates in Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau (STDM), who have a monopoly on casino gambling and are already grumbling about a 20 per cent fall in revenues in 1998.
They rely for much of their business on the visitors who arrive every hour on the jetfoils from Hong Kong.
A big attraction for these gambling-mad Hong Kong punters is the availability of cheap and plentiful hotel rooms in Macau. So it's a safe bet there won't be many of them coming at the time of the handover.