Macau is an autonomous territory on the western side of the Pearl River Delta, China. It is a city state, which is officially independent on China, which means, that they have their own government and their own foreign policy, so most of the countries don't need visa there. But they are still influenced by China a lot.

Macau has two parts. Macau peninsula, which has borders with China mainland (city Zhuhai) and two islands Taipa and Coloane, which were connected by artificial land called Cotai.
Macau is quite small, so you can see everything there in one week. It is a very diverse city, because you can visit there either very modern and huge casinos, same as old Taoist temple from 15th century or several old Portuguese churches.
You can see there very interesting mixture of Chinese and Portuguese culture, which is interesting and quite rare worldwide.

Macau is located approximately 60 km from Hong Kong. You can go there by fast ferry, which departs every 15 minutes and goes there for 70 minutes. I really recommend you to spend there at least two weekends (I was there for 10 days in total), because there is so much to see (modern skyscrapers, absolutely stunning nature, hiking hills...). The best is to meet someone local and let him show you cool non-touristic places.

You can also go to China mainland. Because during the internship you have status of a student of University of Macau, you can get very cheap group visas to the nearest province (Guangjong). If you want to go anywhere further in China, you need to get normal visas. I highly recommend you to get them in your country. You can get them also in Macau (it takes 4 working days), but the embassy is not very helpful and trying to get the visa was the most frustrating thing I did in Macau.

Also you can get very cheap flight tickets to countries around (Taiwan, Vietnam, Phillipines, Thailand, South Korea etc.). The tickets are even cheaper if you fly from Hong Kong (60 EUR return ticket). It is good to go to as many places as possible.

University of Macau, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Automotive Engineering

I was supposed to help some PhD student with his project about suspension for cars, but I told them, that I don't really know anything about suspensions so I wouldn't mind doing something else. Because my supervisor was an associated dean of the faculty he had access to several projects, so after a while he decided to give me my own project.

Some IT company decided, that they want to replace all tourist signs in Macau with new intelligent electronic ones. They already did the software part for that, but didn't know how to make the hardware. So my task was to design a system of gears and shafts, which was rotating the signs according to signal from the software. After several meetings with the company and my supervisor my design was approved and than I had to find how expensive would it be to build, because they needed to apply for money from government. So I contacted Chinese suppliers of all necessary parts and made a budget for the system.

My work was really interesting, because they didn't tell me almost any specifications so I had to find out everything by myself. But most of other trainees didn't do almost anything.

Nice thing was, that I had a flexible working hours and whenever I wanted to get days off for travelling it wasn't problem at all.

O-Form said 5500 MOP for month, but I got 6400 MOP for month and my supervisor gave me 1000 MOP extra in the end of the internship. So I had 6900 MOP (+-900 USD) per month, which is more than enough.

It is good to have high level skill in English. Mostly because a lot of people in the university have very strong Chinese accent, so if your English is poor you might have troubles understanding. But in our group of trainees were some people with not very good English and they didn't face any problems because of that.
For all the students of the university is mandatory to know English, because all textbooks there are in English, but most of them can read and write but they can't speak at all.
In the city, almost nobody speaks English, but for example in buses, names of stations are said in Cantonese, Portuguese, Mandarin and English, in this order, so you can at least understand, when you should leave the buss etc.

It is provided by the university in very nice dorms and it is for free. You only pay for the electricity consumption (+-200 MOP for 2 months), so don't waste electricity unnecessarily.

Rooms are in very modern campus, so everything is new and clean. We stayed in rooms for two, with bathroom, fridge and AC in every room. The accommodation is really nice and it is for free, so perfect :).

IAESTE is provided by employees of the university and our contact person was Patrick, who was really helpful and friendly. We visited him almost every day for tea after lunch and he also joined us few times for beer in the evening. Apart from that IAESTE office invited us for 2 dinners and one lunch.

We were group of +-14 trainees and we were meeting each other every day. All of us stayed in the same floor of the dorm, so it was very easy to see each other. So we organised everything together and in the end we became really good friends.

The rest of the campus was almost empty, because students had summer holidays. So I met only PhD and master students who worked in my office.

Sport facilities in the campus are AMAZING. There is a huge sport complex and all the activities there are for FREE!. The only thing you have to pay for is a swimming pool (5 MOP for whole day). You can go to big gym, play badminton, squash, football, basketball, tennis, table tennis etc. Entrance is for free and also they lend you necessary equipment for free.

I didn't try many culture "things". We went to a cinema in Galaxy casino and IAESTE organised a tea ceremony with a tea master for us, apart from that cultural options in Macau are quite poor, if you don't count gambling in casinos.

Cantonese food is really good. Not very spicy but always delicious. But be prepared to eat rice only. They eat rice all the time with everything.

Prices are : in campus 28-50 MOP
normal restaurant 30-60 MOP
fancy restaurant 70-150 MOP

Really recommend you to try everything possible, because everything I ate was delicious, even though sometimes the name sounded quite scary.

In the campus, you can connect to WiFi anywhere. You can either use their university one or Eduroam. So the communication is very easy.

It is just great!. Especially if you want to see different culture, get ok money and don't want to work very hard, Macau is the best place to go. I spent there the best holidays in my life and I will never regret decision going there.

It is good to get Chinese visa, because it is really annoying to apply for that in Macau as I have already written.
Maybe one sweater, because everywhere is AC and it is usually set very low.
And you should have money for the first month, because they pay you always in the end of the month.

Awesome cultural experience.
I worked on project I could never do in the Czech republic.
I met so many great people.

Good, they helped us with anything we needed.