We stayed at the Mandalay Bay, which is the worst of any hotel that I’ve ever stayed at. There was limited easy access to food and drinking, and I could hear every last sound of every last person as they came to bed. And it smelled funny. And the bathrooms in the casino were yucky.
We shopped, which I haven’t really spent much time doing in Vegas before. You can’t buy too much due to all the walking and carrying, as I found out halfway through a day of walking and carrying too much. There are a lot of neat little boutiques and things to see while you shop, which is all primarily at the Venetian, Caesar’s and the Aladdin, which is currently being turned in to a Planet Hollywood casino. Bleh.
The interesting thing about this trip was definitely the array of cab rides, as one of our companions would chat it up for the ‘scoop’. These people are crazy. One guy doesn’t wear his seat belt because he was choked with it once. One guy walked across the border and married a Dutch girl. We learned all about the City Center Project, Vegas’ most expensive undertaking, where there will be rooms you can live in and rent out when you’re out of town and make a little money on.
We went down to the old strip, another thing I’ve never done. It was a little sketchy, but a lot of fun, something totally different. I had no idea what to expect. Don’t ever order a mixed drink (eew) but otherwise you’re safe. The tables are full of helpful friendly dealers that will help you learn to play. The light shows and attractions were neat as well.
The thing that struck me about Vegas this trip were the sheer number of people fighting. Perhaps I was always too drunk to notice in the past, but maybe Vegas isn’t a good place for couples. PH and I were cracking up at every turn seeing these huge arguments. It lead to a ‘cheers’ each time we saw someone fighting while we were drinking, because we were having good times.
Here’s us, and Elvis, well, two Elvises, (is that Elvii?) for you:
Getting to New Zealand, we travelled through San Fran in order to see my oldest and dearest friends, the Ryans. We arrived Friday and took ourselves from the hotel to Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a really cool dock style shopping area/strip mall. There are these wooden docks that giant seals lay out on. Giant. And they fight, and make a lot of noise. Pretty entertaining.
We took our time at this huge restaurant where we could see them from – eating for about two hours. RD called and met us up later that night for Na’an and Curry, which was one of the best Indian restaurants I’ve been to. He then took us to a bunch of the neatest bars he’d found in the city, including one called Lu Pao, in Chinatown, that was hilarious.
RB met us up and we ran around the city, checked out his place since it was right downtown, and went to a couple other bars, one of which had a house drink that was full of bourbon and gross. But we finished it anyway.
Cat Killfoil 