I'm writing this sitting on the floor of a macau police station. Since there's no crime in macau, in order to keep the police busy and make sure they can afford to hire many extra officers, they set up road blocks and needlessly stop motorists doing nothing wrong to harass them and charge them a fine. To every officer here (There's about 15 standing around doing nothing), it's the strangest thing that I'm sitting on the floor behind the rows of waiting chairs writing. There are three citizens in the station, myself included and all of us are being fined for some bullshit. My fine is going to be 1500 patacas, roughly $200 USD.

I met my friend outside her house at about midnight to go meet another friend for a drink. We hop on my friends sisters motorbike and she lets me drive. A couple minutes from where we are headed we see a road block set up on the side of a round about that we have to go around. Of course we get stopped for the headlight being out. Sometimes it's fun being a foreigner who doesn't speak the language cause they don't know what to do with you, but sometimes it makes things take a hell of a lot longer. If you are a tourist, on the street, the police are the nicest people who ALL speak english and if you ask directions, they will even walk you where you want to go. Now on the other hand, if your taking a girl out on her motorbike, they will be extremely rude, and pretend not to speak any english so they can listen to your conversation and see if your lying. Of course you will pretend to speak zero cantonese, just to be difficult(cause all you can really do is order food and swear, so most of the time it's better to shut up.) So after finding that i don't have my drivers license or a passport on me, they want us to follow an officer back to the police station.

At the police station the police are really confused and don't know what to do with us. They obviously would like to just let us go cause they don't know what to do, but it's already been logged so they have to go through with it. It takes 4 more officers, on top of the 4 that already know to understand my passport and license are sitting at my house.
"Can your friend bring it?"
"Can someone get it?"
"NO"(mostly true)

There's a nice mix of truth, partial-truth, stretched-truth, and bald faced lies you have to tell the police to make things easy, and not have to get into explaining the whole story of your legal-illegal temporary work-around residency, and plain illegal employment. So no, none of my friends can get my passport, I am living with a friend who is the only other person with a key to his(my) apartment, and is currently in Hong Kong, so no one can get my passport and bring it to me. This whole dialog is probably understood by the cops, but being translated by my friend, who is pretending to not really speak well either. I find out the cops are asking her, who am I, what she's doing with me, cause apparently the cops think that we don't know each other, and they think the whole situation is really weird. They call my friends sister to see if the bike is stolen, and her sister has to come to the station to pay the back fines on the bike before Reddy can leave with the bike. I however, being the foreigner with no identification, cannot leave the station. My friends sister show up, pays the back fines from the last 5 years, doesn't even bother to ask me what I'm doing or why I don't have identification, but does let my friend know, the cops think she is out of her mind and can't think and that her sister should take care of her. My friends cleared to go, so I give her my keys and instructions of where my identification is and her and her sister takes off to try to get me freed from the police station.

Soon after they left I ask one of the police for a piece of paper. Even though they are pretending to not speak english, he perfectly understood what I wanted and what I said. I sat down behind the waiting chairs on the floor and proceeded to write this story. I'm sure almost every officer in the place has come over to see what I'm doing, some just curious, some think I'm plotting an escape bombing route or some shit. Halfway through the story, not very much longer later(maybe 45 minutes) my friend returns with my id and I hand it to the cops. They are eager to get this taken care of and get me out of there. The copy my passport and do all the bullshit and come back to me cause my drivers license is expired(that's true). I explain that I've been in Asia since before my license expired(true) and that I have no way of getting my updated license here(I don't know if that's true or not) but it's sitting in the US waiting for me(Not True). They kinda accept that but can't lose face that way so she tells me my license is only for motor cars, and not motor bikes(true), but I explain that in california the license is the same(Not True). She gets really confused and no matter how confident she is about what she knew, I could see she made it up and believed me. In the end she fined me 1500 Patacas($200US) and gave me 15 days to pay it cause she tought I was right about the license and this gives me time to get the real one. If within that 15 days I can get my non expired motorcycle endorsed drivers license(which doesn't exist), I will only be fined 200 Patacas for driving without my license on me. If I don't pay at all, I can still leave the country, but they will send me a notice(to the wrong apartment) and call me (on the wrong phone number) to show up in court. If I don't do that I'll be black listed and not allowed back into Macau.

All in All, Cops are fuckin dicks, but at least I have this story to tell, and even though I haven't done everything there is to do in Macau, I can at least say I've been detained by the police.
Peace