I STEPPED into the cool, smoke laden atmosphere of the Casino Lisbon, changed a few patacas into chips and took my chances at the tables with the Chinese gamblers and their busty escorts.
Having indifferent luck I tried a slot machine, hit a jackpot and found myself ahead by the price of a modest lunch, whereupon I left and became a member of a very small club those who make money in Macau's gambling dens.
The Portuguese colony has long had a reputation as a rather seedy enclave on the south China coast, dedicated to extracting large profits from gamblers who come from Hong Kong and across the border in China, where games of chance are forbidden.
However, apart from the waterfront casinos, there is little evidence on the streets of this seamy side of Macau's character, or of the fact that one per cent of its population is from Thailand and is engaged in the "entertainment business" along with a few hundred Russian women.
In fact, it is quite a charming town of restored colonial terraces with balustraded balconies and ocre washed walls, overshadowed by some new hotels and apartment blocks.
During the day school children in uniforms fill the cobbled side streets where old baroque churches can be found. In the Camoes Gardens, men play Chinese chess and take their songbirds for walks past the bust of the 16th century Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes, who wrote an epic about Vasco da Gama's voyage to India and was reputed to have lived once in Macau.
It has a few distinctly Mediterranean type restaurants, like the Miss Macau, where I had a seafood stew with expatriate Brian Murphy of Newry, who helps to run the greyhound stadium. The restaurant got its name because three daughters of the proprietor won the Macau beauty contest, and pictures of their crowned heads grace the wall, along with a ceramic image of Our Lady of Fatima.
On a hill overlooking the city stands the front wall of St Paul's Church, once the most magnificent Christian edifice in the orient, now a metaphor for the hollow facade of Portuguese rule.
The oldest surviving European settlement in Asia, Macau will officially revert to China in 1999. Portugal actually wanted to give it back in 1974 but, fearing the loss of foreign trade, the Chinese asked them to leave things as they were.
Unlike Hong Kong however the transition is going smoothly, not least because the enclave has already more or less surrendered to China's embrace and has given Beijing almost everything it wanted. Six years ago the Portuguese even crated and shipped to Portugal a statue of a 19th century governor, Joao Ferreira do Amiral, because China said it was "too colonial".
Some say it is not the Portuguese who run Macau in any case but a Chinese business syndicate called STDM - Sociedade de Tunsmo e Diversoes de Macau.
STDM monopolises the nine casinos and part owns Macau's new airport, oil terminal, port, bridges, golf course, and the red and white jetfoils which bring tourists every half hour from Hong Kong. It is jokingly known as the only private company in the world with its own colony.
Father Lancelot Rodrigues, who came from Malaysia 61 years ago and runs the Catholic Social Services office in Macau, believes that little will change in the mainly Chinese city of 425,000 people after the Portuguese have gone.
Sitting in his office in shirt sleeves and braces, the 73 year old priest sipped a Scotch while he searched for the right word to explain why the Portuguese got on better with the Chinese than did the British.
"Flexibility," he said eventually. "The Portuguese are flexible. They are very proud people, but quite flexible in diplomacy."
The Portuguese also married local Chinese, he said, producing a mixed race known as Macanese. Moreover the Portuguese never took the 17 sq km enclave by force. Unlike the British they did not humiliate the Chinese with gunboats. They negotiated an agreement to administer Macau.
Father Rodrigues, on of Macau's most knowledgeable residents believes the restrictions on religion in China will not be imposed on the enclave, where there are about 25,000 Catholics.
The Malaysian born priest described a remarkably close relationship between the Catholic Church in Macau and communist China.
"I go regularly to China at their invitation," he said. "I give courses for the treatment of the mentally handicapped and speech impaired."
He and other foreign priests worked with Conossian nuns from Hong Kong and Singapore in several places on the Chinese mainland, he stated, though the order had been expelled from China in 1949. Bishop Dominic Lam, the first Chinese Bishop in Macau in 450 years, also visited China regularly.
Their biggest problem was a shortage of local vocations. "We have 60 or 70 priests in Macau but most of them are all old," he explained, as 82 year old Glasgow born Father Alex Smith, who was once a ballboy for Celtic football team in the 1930s, nodded in agreement from a seat in a corner.
"Cambodian priests and Dominicans are here. We have Spanish and Italians. But we have a seminary without seminarians."
What worried people was rising crime, which had accompanied growing prosperity in China and was now on a "grand scale", with abductions and loan sharking. "The Brigadier General, the chief of security here, he insists we have to be more careful now," said the priest, "but it is still a safe city, you can walk around at night."
"I'm a very optimistic chap," he said. "It will be business as usual after 1999. The gambling will stay. We have our difficulties, the church naturally will lose the assistance given by the Portuguese government, like our salaries.
"But we are very friendly with the Chinese, and the Chinese government is asking Eurasians like myself and local Portuguese to remain here. Some will leave. But I will stay, certainly."