Las Vegas!

Tuesday
I arrived in Las Vegas at 8:30 am and the first thing I saw was this billboard for the Thunder From Down Under. Not only was I suddenly absolutely certain that I was in Las Vegas, I had a very strong desire to see the show. That's what 3 hours of sleep will do to you, hu?

Travis was a doll and picked me up at the airport and took me home, where I slept for about 6 hours. Chris came home from work and we went out to get sushi for dinner. We went to Yama Sushi, which regardless of Travis' feelings, was pretty awesome. All of the special rolls had dirty names - Whose Your Daddy?, The Man Whore, Strip Tease, One Minute Man, Happy Ending. Just ordering the food was fun, as the waitress repeats everything back to you and laughs just as much. My favorite was the Wet Dream - a baked California roll topped with cream cheese and shrimp. Fantastic.

I was still tired when we got home so we decided to have a quiet night in. Apparently the current favorite movie in their household is Easy A, so we watched that and Travis made amazing cookies - Oreo stuffed chocolate chip cookies, to be precise. Delicious.

Wednesday
Some things needed to be worked on in their kitchen, so at noon, the handyman arrived. Bailey (and his dog, a sweetheart of a yellow lab) amused Travis and I for hours. Or rather, making sexually inappropriate jokes about Bailey to each other amused us for hours.

For dinner we had sushi again, this time at Sushi Mon. We, also again, got the all you can eat sushi, which is probably the greatest thing ever invented. For $25 you can eat as much as possible in 60 minutes, which for a normal person is 4-5 rolls. As each one is anywhere from $8-12, its a steal. While the names on this menu weren't as fun, the food was, as Travis swore all of the night before, much better, and their choice of baked rolls was much wider - baked rolls are my new favorite thing. They also had amazing mochi ice cream for dessert. I really need more Japanese food in my life.

After dinner Chris and Travis took me on a tour of Vegas.

























As you can see, there are pirates, various national landmarks, and even volcanoes in Las Vegas.
















Thursday
Bailey was back, this time with the parts necessary to whatever he was fixing. The filthy jokes continued and only increased with Chris' return from work. It was eventually decided that Bailey wanted all of us, and that we should have an orgy while Chris played with the dog. This (probably*) didn't happen.

The Handyman was there so long, in fact, that we decided to have a quiet night in. Travis spent a few hours teaching me how to play blackjack; it is a lot of fun, but I am too poor to actually gamble. The idea of making money is really nice, the idea of losing money really sucks. So I'll just stick with the money I have.

This relatively event-less day did lead to one fantastic discovery: the Machine of Death. It is a collection of short stories that all began with one webcomic, and if you haven't read it yet, you really should. As the velociraptor says, it sounds pretty morbid, but it is really interesting. Each story is written by a different author, and so each gives a slightly different take on the social repercussions of everyone knowing how they will die. I only got about 90 pages into it (out of nearly 500), so I should probably just bite the bullet and buy it.

Friday
Thursday night Travis informed me that we would be up early Friday morning, so I had to be ready to actually do things before noon. Damn.

The first thing we did was to buy tickets to, tra la la! The Thunder from Down Under. This was to be my first adult entertainment show, and I must admit to a certain amount of giddy-ness. We had breakfast at Coco's Bakery. Really nice place for a chain diner, and I got to try the miracle that is Red Velvet Pancakes. Be still, my beating heart.

Travis then kidnapped me. He said our destination was a surprise, and surprise it was. I had no idea the Hoover Dam is 20 miles from Vegas.





























But so it is. Here is my one nerdy fact about the Hoover Dam:
If the amount of concrete in the dam was used to build a two-lane highway, it would go from New York City to San Francisco. That's a lot of road.

Another fact, this one less fun and more the kind of thing I feel I should know, and don't: the Hoover Dam is on the boarder between Nevada and Arizona. This means halfway across, the time zone changes. It also means that we crossed into Arizona to park, and it is free there and about $10 in Nevada.

We went home after that and watched about 90 Family Guy episodes waiting for Chris to come back with Brad in tow. Apparently Las Vegas traffic sucks.







Dinner was at a faux British restaurant. The food was good, service was not. I won't say what place it was, so as not to be libelous, but suffice it to say, I wouldn't go again. Travis, Chris, Me, Brad

Then, finally, we went to see the show. The Thunder from Down Under. Even the name makes you chuckle, doesn't it? I'm not sure what I was expecting from the show - a little titillation, a little amusement, I don't know. What I was not expecting was to laugh until I cried, to not be attracted to the dancers in the slightest, but to be kissed buy one of them anyway. There were so many moments in the show that I would like to share, but I will limit myself to two.

The tears of laughter came right at the beginning. The men had already done a few dances and I was already in a high-strung, slap-happy mood. The DJ announced, during a costume change, that the "Lads from down undah, these strapping Aussie boys", would now fulfill all of our fantasies. "Give it up for, the Pirates of the Caribbean!" I think I managed to squeak "the Caribbean in Australia?!" before I dissolved into laughter. Literally. Sprawled across the table, in utter hysterics. I think I missed all of the pirate number, which is a shame, since of the choices of pirates, Spartans, firemen, and cowboys, pirates are definitely at the top of my fantasy list. I'm pretty sure all the boys (I love the fact that I went with Chris, John and Travis) thought I was out of my mind, but I don't care.

My other favorite moment came when the DJ did his own striptease. He pulled a middle aged woman onto the stage - she was there for her daughter's 21st birthday party - and culminated the act by grabbing her hand and shoving it into the front of his pants. Sexual harassment aside, she loved it. She tottered off the stage in fits of glee, stuck her offended digits into her daughter's face and yelled, loud enough for us to hear over the music, "Smell my hand!!!"

I can't really top that last part, so I'll just say that while I loved visiting my friends in Vegas, I probably wouldn't go out of my way to visit that particular city again. Maybe. You never know. I do kind of miss those Australian boys.

*It didn't.