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alonewiththemoonWe are back!
On the hotel cable, there is a channel of material produced for the Tourism and Convention Center of Las Vegas. It's actually very informative and interesting stuff. On one of the programs, we saw an interview with Penn and Teller in which Penn (of course) made an observation that seemed to sum up Las Vegas: Las Vegas is shrimp. To wit, shrimp is expensive and therefore it is classy and for rich people. Thus every restaurant and buffet in Vegas pours on the shrimp. But to believe that shrimp is still classy and rich when it is everywhere is not in fact classy at all. And that is Vegas.
Casinos smell like stale smoke and carpet shampooer, every last one of them. The smoke was annoying but not too bad. There's no smoking in restaurants or bars, but people can still smoke on the casino floors, so that they will not leave their machines. The casino floors are large enough that it's like being near smokers outdoors, except that the smokers follow you every where you go.
Food in Vegas is pretty bad, we found. If I were a real vegetarian and did not eat fish I would have had difficulty keeping myself fed. Most places subscribed to a more is more theory that sometimes sabotaged the food. For example, at Fusia in the Luxor I had tuna tataki, one of my favorite dishes. It was made using a huge slab of tuna, double the thickness you'd see most places. You'd think more tuna would be a good thing, but in this case it meant that the inside of the tuna could not get warmed up during the searing, and was still so cold that it didn't taste like much, despite being nice looking tuna. Mixology was uniformly lousy as well, though I'm sure there must be good bars/bartenders somewhere in Vegas. We certainly did not find them, though.
But food and smoke aside, we had a great time. In many ways Vegas is all the things one ought to hate about American society, but when you are there all you can do is embrace it in all its wasteful glory. I am not at all unaware of the irony of spending Earth Day in Vegas. They did not seem to observe it there. In fact, Las Vegas truly seemed like a world unto itself. We saw a little news about the Pennsylvania primary, and it seemed like something that was happening in some other timeline.
So, day one, we arrived at the Luxor, a hotel shaped like a giant pyramid and littered with Egyptian statuary:
The giant head in the rock was right outside the Luxor's buffet, More, which was terrible and marginally worth the $3 that it cost us with a coupon.
This was the view right outside our room, looking down inside the pyramid. There is an entire IMAX theatre in there as well.
The Luxor also contained a replica of Tutankhamun's tomb more or less as it would have appeared before being ransacked by robbers and archaeologists. I was slightly disappointed by this as I thought it would be full of stuff, but instead they chose to display some of the items in separate cabinets. Still, it was very neat to see what the tomb was like.
While staying at the Luxor, we also went on the IMAX motion ride, sort of an Indiana Jones/Stargate inspired story. It was cheesy but fun. It actually felt rather good to be shaken up all over the place after spending hours on airplanes.
Tuesday we went on a tour of Red Rocks Canyon, with unexpected bonus tours of the Clark County Heritage Museum, the Strip and various other landmarks. The tour was run by Grey Lines, and our driver/guide was excellent, very knowledgeable and enthusiastic, even though he's probably delivered the same patter hundreds of times. It was also great to get a driving tour of the Strip the day before we set off to explore it on foot/bus/monorail, so that we had an idea of where things were.
Here's the Ghost Town at the Clark County Heritage Museum, along with a couple of its denizens:
M in the jail
Me in the, yep, cemetery.
Farming implement
yay for camera with macro closeup! This little guy's body was about as big as my thumb.
Then we went on to Red Rocks Canyon. We did not see any wild horses, but you could just imagine herds sweeping across the landscape--this was truly the iconic West of movies, paintings and folklore. I am very, very glad that I saw it.
You probably can't make it out in this photo, but in the circled area there are red hand prints, done probably by the ancestors of the Paiute people:
And right next to the hand prints was an agave roasting pit, a large pit filled with gravel that people used to cook agave and other foods. It was located in a very scenic spot and you could imagine people lounging around after eating, telling stories and soaking in the view.
After our trip to Red Rocks, we dusted ourselves off and went to the Moroccan restaurant Marrakesh, where we saw bhuzzer Aradia perform. I highly, highly recommend Marrakesh to anyone traveling to Vegas. It's off the Strip but cab fare was about $12 from our hotel. I wish I had taken pictures there--as I said to M, dancing in a place with so much atmosphere would automatically inspire one to become a better dancer. Draperies everywhere, mosaics, hanging lamps, etc--exactly the fantasy of an opulent desert tent, but tasteful. The food was delicious, by far the best food we ate in Vegas, nothing else came even close. Aradia put on a great show, a kind of hybrid between Arabic and AmCab that worked very well for a restaurant show. The restaurant wasn't that full but she still gave it her all. I got a round of applause from the restaurant after she asked me up to dance :-) We had a chance to briefly introduce ourselves, and after watching her I'd definitely take a workshop with her or make an effort to see her perform again.
Wednesday was action-packed. We started the day with a visit to Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat in the Mirage. The Mirage itself was pretty spectacular and would be an instant shot of anti-depressant in January or February, all bright and jungly and warm. The Dolphin Habitat is a research and training facility; they do not put on shows, leaving whatever antics the dolphins wish to do up to the dolphins. The trainers came out to interact with them, however, and it was clear that the dolphins loved interacting. They reminded me of big dogs, rushing back and forth under the water, playing tag with the trainers, leaping for the fun of it. There was also a baby dolphin who was the cutest thing ever, racing about like a hyperactive golden retriever puppy.
Here's the baby--all the dolphins periodically jumped out of the water just to look at people and see what was going on.
Next was the Secret Garden. At first we were a little sad by the size of the enclosures, but later in the day when at the MGM Grand we learned that the MGM's lions live out at a ranch and take turns being on display, and I think that must be the case at Siegfried and Roy's as well, since they have many lions and tigers and leopards and so forth but we only saw a handful of them. They did all look fit, if lazy. (Then again, they are cats and it was about 80, lazy would be appropriate.) I have no idea why alpacas seemed like a good fit with lions and tigers and leopards etc., but there was an alpaca enclosure as well. This alpaca in particular reminded me of our ferret Ronan:
A white-maned lion:
A lazy leopard:
A white tiger:
A lady and a tiger:
Me and M outside the Dolphin Habitat:
After the Mirage, we picked up the Monorail inside a very scary country and western themed casino and headed to the Las Vegas Hilton for the Star Trek Experience. We had a great time there. The Klingon ride was entertaining enough, but the Borg Encounter 4D was very cool. We felt like enormous geeks and it felt good.
At Quark's Bar I had a Warp Core Breach, and a Klingon made fun of M for drinking a milkshake.
A warp core breach pretty much tastes like a jolly rancher, but it bubbles and has steam rising off of it and comes in a cool glass, so there you go. The bar was the nicest bar we went to in Vegas, oddly enough; it felt like a good place to hang out. Granted we might have been biased because of the non-stop Star Trek episodes running on the monitors, but it was clear that a fair number of the other people sitting at the bar were people who lived and worked in Las Vegas, and that says something good about a bar. It was the kind of place where everyone was in one big conversation.
We took the monorail back to our hotel--it ends at the MGM Grand, and I had remembered reading that there was a free Lion Habitat there. If there are free lions, I am going to have free lions! The enclosure seemed sad at first until, as mentioned above, a narrator told us that the lions don't live there, they just visit in five hour shifts. There were two lionesses and they were physically very impressive animals. Two keepers hung out in the enclosure as well, to accustom the lions to their presence and encourage the lions to think of those particular people as part of their pride.
Wednesday night we went to Zumanity, where of course I could not take any pictures, so you don't get any. It was pretty fantastic, I must say. Sexy, ribald, elegant, coarse, erotic, disturbing, fascinating, often all at the same time. I'm glad that we got to see a sexy show while in Vegas, and I'm even gladder that it was the Cirque du Soleil's unique vision that we got to see.
On our way in to Zumanity we were offered free admission to Coyote Ugly. We managed not to look too scornful when we said no thanks. Oh, and before the show we ate at Nine Fine Irishmen, which is a bit of a travesty of an Irish pub in New York, New York, but the food was ok as pub food goes. They had a live band that was rather too proggy jazz fusion for my tastes and a step dancer up on a go-go platform. The best part of the dinner was watching a tiny Asian lady probably in her 60s wearing various shades of hot pink--including a big floppy hat--dancing enthusiastically to the Irish band. That's world fusion for you.
Thursday was an eternal trip home, yesterday was spent in a post vacation haze. The real world is slowly seeping back in. My foot held up ok--I don't think I could have done one more day, but I managed somehow to keep on going. We already want to go back again, because there was so much more to see. One thing we definitely want to do on a future trip is to go back up to Red Rocks Canyon on our own and do some of the hiking trails. I was itching to really delve into the landscape but the tour bus had a schedule to keep. Apparently if you hike, you are very likely to encounter wild burros, something I would most like to do! April was definitely a great time to visit; it was in the upper 70s/low 80s during the day, but always breezy so it never felt hot, and then in the upper 50s/low 60s at night, generally quite refreshing.
And that is that.
On the hotel cable, there is a channel of material produced for the Tourism and Convention Center of Las Vegas. It's actually very informative and interesting stuff. On one of the programs, we saw an interview with Penn and Teller in which Penn (of course) made an observation that seemed to sum up Las Vegas: Las Vegas is shrimp. To wit, shrimp is expensive and therefore it is classy and for rich people. Thus every restaurant and buffet in Vegas pours on the shrimp. But to believe that shrimp is still classy and rich when it is everywhere is not in fact classy at all. And that is Vegas.
Casinos smell like stale smoke and carpet shampooer, every last one of them. The smoke was annoying but not too bad. There's no smoking in restaurants or bars, but people can still smoke on the casino floors, so that they will not leave their machines. The casino floors are large enough that it's like being near smokers outdoors, except that the smokers follow you every where you go.
Food in Vegas is pretty bad, we found. If I were a real vegetarian and did not eat fish I would have had difficulty keeping myself fed. Most places subscribed to a more is more theory that sometimes sabotaged the food. For example, at Fusia in the Luxor I had tuna tataki, one of my favorite dishes. It was made using a huge slab of tuna, double the thickness you'd see most places. You'd think more tuna would be a good thing, but in this case it meant that the inside of the tuna could not get warmed up during the searing, and was still so cold that it didn't taste like much, despite being nice looking tuna. Mixology was uniformly lousy as well, though I'm sure there must be good bars/bartenders somewhere in Vegas. We certainly did not find them, though.
But food and smoke aside, we had a great time. In many ways Vegas is all the things one ought to hate about American society, but when you are there all you can do is embrace it in all its wasteful glory. I am not at all unaware of the irony of spending Earth Day in Vegas. They did not seem to observe it there. In fact, Las Vegas truly seemed like a world unto itself. We saw a little news about the Pennsylvania primary, and it seemed like something that was happening in some other timeline.
So, day one, we arrived at the Luxor, a hotel shaped like a giant pyramid and littered with Egyptian statuary:
The giant head in the rock was right outside the Luxor's buffet, More, which was terrible and marginally worth the $3 that it cost us with a coupon.
This was the view right outside our room, looking down inside the pyramid. There is an entire IMAX theatre in there as well.
The Luxor also contained a replica of Tutankhamun's tomb more or less as it would have appeared before being ransacked by robbers and archaeologists. I was slightly disappointed by this as I thought it would be full of stuff, but instead they chose to display some of the items in separate cabinets. Still, it was very neat to see what the tomb was like.
While staying at the Luxor, we also went on the IMAX motion ride, sort of an Indiana Jones/Stargate inspired story. It was cheesy but fun. It actually felt rather good to be shaken up all over the place after spending hours on airplanes.
Tuesday we went on a tour of Red Rocks Canyon, with unexpected bonus tours of the Clark County Heritage Museum, the Strip and various other landmarks. The tour was run by Grey Lines, and our driver/guide was excellent, very knowledgeable and enthusiastic, even though he's probably delivered the same patter hundreds of times. It was also great to get a driving tour of the Strip the day before we set off to explore it on foot/bus/monorail, so that we had an idea of where things were.
Here's the Ghost Town at the Clark County Heritage Museum, along with a couple of its denizens:
M in the jail
Me in the, yep, cemetery.
Farming implement
yay for camera with macro closeup! This little guy's body was about as big as my thumb.
Then we went on to Red Rocks Canyon. We did not see any wild horses, but you could just imagine herds sweeping across the landscape--this was truly the iconic West of movies, paintings and folklore. I am very, very glad that I saw it.
You probably can't make it out in this photo, but in the circled area there are red hand prints, done probably by the ancestors of the Paiute people:
And right next to the hand prints was an agave roasting pit, a large pit filled with gravel that people used to cook agave and other foods. It was located in a very scenic spot and you could imagine people lounging around after eating, telling stories and soaking in the view.
After our trip to Red Rocks, we dusted ourselves off and went to the Moroccan restaurant Marrakesh, where we saw bhuzzer Aradia perform. I highly, highly recommend Marrakesh to anyone traveling to Vegas. It's off the Strip but cab fare was about $12 from our hotel. I wish I had taken pictures there--as I said to M, dancing in a place with so much atmosphere would automatically inspire one to become a better dancer. Draperies everywhere, mosaics, hanging lamps, etc--exactly the fantasy of an opulent desert tent, but tasteful. The food was delicious, by far the best food we ate in Vegas, nothing else came even close. Aradia put on a great show, a kind of hybrid between Arabic and AmCab that worked very well for a restaurant show. The restaurant wasn't that full but she still gave it her all. I got a round of applause from the restaurant after she asked me up to dance :-) We had a chance to briefly introduce ourselves, and after watching her I'd definitely take a workshop with her or make an effort to see her perform again.
Wednesday was action-packed. We started the day with a visit to Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat in the Mirage. The Mirage itself was pretty spectacular and would be an instant shot of anti-depressant in January or February, all bright and jungly and warm. The Dolphin Habitat is a research and training facility; they do not put on shows, leaving whatever antics the dolphins wish to do up to the dolphins. The trainers came out to interact with them, however, and it was clear that the dolphins loved interacting. They reminded me of big dogs, rushing back and forth under the water, playing tag with the trainers, leaping for the fun of it. There was also a baby dolphin who was the cutest thing ever, racing about like a hyperactive golden retriever puppy.
Here's the baby--all the dolphins periodically jumped out of the water just to look at people and see what was going on.
Next was the Secret Garden. At first we were a little sad by the size of the enclosures, but later in the day when at the MGM Grand we learned that the MGM's lions live out at a ranch and take turns being on display, and I think that must be the case at Siegfried and Roy's as well, since they have many lions and tigers and leopards and so forth but we only saw a handful of them. They did all look fit, if lazy. (Then again, they are cats and it was about 80, lazy would be appropriate.) I have no idea why alpacas seemed like a good fit with lions and tigers and leopards etc., but there was an alpaca enclosure as well. This alpaca in particular reminded me of our ferret Ronan:
A white-maned lion:
A lazy leopard:
A white tiger:
A lady and a tiger:
Me and M outside the Dolphin Habitat:
After the Mirage, we picked up the Monorail inside a very scary country and western themed casino and headed to the Las Vegas Hilton for the Star Trek Experience. We had a great time there. The Klingon ride was entertaining enough, but the Borg Encounter 4D was very cool. We felt like enormous geeks and it felt good.
At Quark's Bar I had a Warp Core Breach, and a Klingon made fun of M for drinking a milkshake.
A warp core breach pretty much tastes like a jolly rancher, but it bubbles and has steam rising off of it and comes in a cool glass, so there you go. The bar was the nicest bar we went to in Vegas, oddly enough; it felt like a good place to hang out. Granted we might have been biased because of the non-stop Star Trek episodes running on the monitors, but it was clear that a fair number of the other people sitting at the bar were people who lived and worked in Las Vegas, and that says something good about a bar. It was the kind of place where everyone was in one big conversation.
We took the monorail back to our hotel--it ends at the MGM Grand, and I had remembered reading that there was a free Lion Habitat there. If there are free lions, I am going to have free lions! The enclosure seemed sad at first until, as mentioned above, a narrator told us that the lions don't live there, they just visit in five hour shifts. There were two lionesses and they were physically very impressive animals. Two keepers hung out in the enclosure as well, to accustom the lions to their presence and encourage the lions to think of those particular people as part of their pride.
Wednesday night we went to Zumanity, where of course I could not take any pictures, so you don't get any. It was pretty fantastic, I must say. Sexy, ribald, elegant, coarse, erotic, disturbing, fascinating, often all at the same time. I'm glad that we got to see a sexy show while in Vegas, and I'm even gladder that it was the Cirque du Soleil's unique vision that we got to see.
On our way in to Zumanity we were offered free admission to Coyote Ugly. We managed not to look too scornful when we said no thanks. Oh, and before the show we ate at Nine Fine Irishmen, which is a bit of a travesty of an Irish pub in New York, New York, but the food was ok as pub food goes. They had a live band that was rather too proggy jazz fusion for my tastes and a step dancer up on a go-go platform. The best part of the dinner was watching a tiny Asian lady probably in her 60s wearing various shades of hot pink--including a big floppy hat--dancing enthusiastically to the Irish band. That's world fusion for you.
Thursday was an eternal trip home, yesterday was spent in a post vacation haze. The real world is slowly seeping back in. My foot held up ok--I don't think I could have done one more day, but I managed somehow to keep on going. We already want to go back again, because there was so much more to see. One thing we definitely want to do on a future trip is to go back up to Red Rocks Canyon on our own and do some of the hiking trails. I was itching to really delve into the landscape but the tour bus had a schedule to keep. Apparently if you hike, you are very likely to encounter wild burros, something I would most like to do! April was definitely a great time to visit; it was in the upper 70s/low 80s during the day, but always breezy so it never felt hot, and then in the upper 50s/low 60s at night, generally quite refreshing.
And that is that.
