Our day began early very early, 5 am to be exact. When you are at BART at this hour, pretty much everyone on BART is going to the airport.
You can see the casinos when you land in the airplane, the Luxor and the Wynn are basically backed up against the landing strip. On our way in, we were all thinking the same thing, "Wouldn't it be weird to live in Las Vegas, a town full of visitors?" I asked the cabby if he lived in Vegas. He did for all of his 45 years.
I took photos from the cab like a cheesy tourist. Vegas really does feel like a theme park at certain moments, and the roller coaster and miniature buildings of New York, New York fit right in with that.
Unable to check into our hotel, we grabbed some breakfast at the Starbuck's in the casino. The pastries there were not normal pastries, they were huge and all covered with inches of thick icing. The sticky buns were the size of baseballs. They must have gotten them from somewhere in the area.
We then headed to the jacuzzi, mind you, it's probably about 9am in the morning. The desert had yet to heat up the strip, and it was really cold. I kept my knit cap on while cooking in the bubbles.
We ate at Diablo's, a Chevy's-esque Mexican food restaurant in front of the Monte Carlo. We ordered some spicy mojitos that contained jalapeno seeds. I was doing fine and then one of the seeds lit my tongue on fire. I pleaded the waiter for an ounce of milk and he obliged me with a whole glass.
Still unable to check into our hotel, we wandered the strip and checked out the interior of the Bellagio with the Chihuly ceiling and botanical butterfly house installed in the front area. The Bellagio was definitely my favorite hotel of all the ones they visited. I loved the waterfall/waterworks that happen every hour in front of the hotel in their giant man made lake where spouts of water erupt from the lake to the tune of popular songs. It's a big, glorious, beautiful use/waste of water. We wondered what it would feel like to be on top of one of those water jets when they go off, to which my response was, "That'd be a hysterectomy."
We also went into the Venetian with it's faux-canals, replete with gondola rides and clouds painted on the ceiling inside the casino shops. The cloud motif, I later discovered continued in most of the shopping areas within the casinos, including Paris, Miracle Mile, and Caesar's Palace. Vegas is all about simulation and the being outside while you're inside feeling makes sense, especially in a city where temperatures top one hundred degrees on a regular basis.
Vegas is full of vacation items that are temporal and useful only in their gratuitous celebration of the moment and one's ability to push that moment to the limits of it's ostentation for a relatively cheap price. I am speaking of the mardi gras like necklaces that are sold and the yard long margaritas that you can drink in public.
Finally getting back to the hotel, we napped, got dressed to go out and went to the Paris hotel for the dinner buffet. Having long heard about the Vegas buffet, this was an event we were looking forward to. We arrived and I was both surprised and disappointed. Disappointed that it looked like a regular buffet, no ice sculptures or gold, but surprised that things like crab legs, bouillebaise and cod were available in an all you can eat format. Even though my peeps weren't as crazy about this buffet, it still was the first evidence I had that Vegas has some of the best buffets anywhere. We ate to the point of bursting and were comatose afterwards.
Hoping to earn some free drinks, we played the penny slots at the Paris. The food expanded, the wine they gave us was awful. My friend who played the Kenny Rogers machine had the hot machine. I realized that the old slot machines are better odds-wise than the strictly video machines. It's funny to me that all the casino's look different inside, but their slot machines and tables all pretty much look the same.
Everything in Vegas looks so close, but is actually far away. Space and time are distorted. This is especially true when you are full and trying to get back towards your hotel. Having finally made it, we decided to check out Diablo's. Inside, a cover band playing 80's and 90's rock, a la Lynard Skynard and Pearl Jam, with additional hot pants clad gogo Dancers offering shots in your mouth.
And then we went to sleep . . . .
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