If you're like me, you've never heard of Macau before in your life. As it turns out, it's a lovely little "special administrative region" (technical term, apparently) of the People's Republic of China, like Hong Kong, except nowhere near as well known. Also unlike Hong Kong, I had a tendency to believe that the people who lived there were actual macaws until I looked into it further.
Naturally, the fact that this was not the case disappointed me greatly.
Anyway, as lovely as I'm sure Macau is, it's not what this is blog post is about. It's about something completely different: the pataca!
The pataca is the Macanese (read: Macau-ian) unit of currency. It's 100% backed by the Hong Kong dollar, rather than being its own thing, and according to Wikipedia, HKD$1.00 = MOP$1.03. Wicked!
Despite using the dollar sign, the pataca isn't a dollar. It's a pataca! And MOP$0.01 isn't one cent, it's one avo. Ten avos make a ho, and so, accordingly, ten hos make a pataca. That's something to keep in mind next time you see a lot of skin out on town; "Oh look," you can wryly comment to your cultured clubbing buddies, "the collective noun for that group of females is a pataca."
gotta love those Egyptian macaws in China
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