I just got back from Las Vegas where we spent Christmas. I'll actually be back there again right before New Years with the usual posse. This trip though was a crazy one. First off we took the 168 out of Bishop to the 266 over the high sierras until we hit the 95 in Nevada. We were pretty much the only fools out there over Death Valley on windy mountain roads. Nobody for 200 miles except for this hippy in a pickup that we seem to keep passing over and over. No gas stations, not a single building, no restrooms for pretty much 3 hours until we saw this brothel where the 266 and the 95 meet. Welcome to Nevada! Sophia was puking and crapping the entire time since she caught the stomach flu right before we got to Mammoth.
So when we got to Vegas we went to the Sam Woo on Spring Mountain Road. My dad must have not liked the fine dining in the high Sierras so much cause he went straight for the seafood tofu hotpot. We checked in at the Tuscany Suites afterwards. Its becoming my favorite place to stay now but still second to the Venetian. Funny I ate at the cafe there and I recognized the filipina waitress from when me Dan and Jerome ate there in May. She didn't believe I was born in Manila until my dad started busting out the Tagalog. That night we went to the Wynn to get tickets for Le Reve but it was sold out so we went with plan B, RAIN at Ceasar's Palace. (Kathryn, your mom is going to be jealous!) What do you know they had tickets in a block of 6 for us.
On Sunday Sophia still couldn't hold down food or liquids so we took her to the ER and we chilled there while they hooked her up to an IV and gave her some antibiotics and cramping and nausea drugs. We also went shopping and went to church in the meantime. It was Christmas Eve after all. So this church on the strip was really weird. It was sandwiched between the Wynn and the Convention Center. Ironically its probably the one place on the strip least likely to have a wedding at any given time.
Once Sophia got better and got discharged we got ready to go to the concert. Oh man that was something. I have no idea who Rain is but hey how can you go wrong with some song and dance right? So we showed up at the Collesium and most of Rain's fans were already there. Lot of young Korean girls, middle aged asian women, (a number of whom came alone), girlfriends with their disgruntled boyfriends, other families, and other groupies like the motherly blonde woman that sat behind us who knew all his songs. Anyway the show starts and I kid you not, he pops out of a huge inflatable submarine and starts singing and break dancing. Other highlights include Rain taking his shirt off and getting drenched in rain on stage. Some dancing with his fly girls, a flag sequence and of course the grand finale, Rain being raised on a pedestal superimposed over giant animated wings on the LCD screen. The military motif throughout the thing was kinda odd.
I gotta give the guy credit, I mean he's playing Vegas to a packed house at 23 and it takes some incredible conditioning to sing and dance for 2 hours and keep the energy level high. His English isn't so great, but he's probably had to memorize the whole routine in Japanese and Chinese too for the world tour. The winking and the "how are you my babies?" was pretty cornball, no smooth operator there, but his fans though it was cute. The songs are pretty catchy, haha too bad I don't speak Korean. I only wished the White Zinfendel I snuck in didn't run out halfway through the show.
So Vegas and Mammoth were pretty fun, good few days to fart around.
>On 2007-01-01,05:51:41 Blaise wrote:
>>And a happy new year!
