Day 3
The day started out with me finally getting a six inch piece of meat.
It was predictably just a hot dog from the snack bar outside the elevator (it was really much wider than I'd want anyway), but I felt it was a success worth starting the day with.
At some point I was informed my dad wouldn't be joining today's family get-together since he was in a poker tournament. He ended up (many hours later) in the top 8, where they decided (they being the other seven competitors) to split the pot evenly instead of to play it out (where fifth would have been required to win any money), which is pretty much the lamest thing in the world and my dad clearly wasn't cool with that lame ass idea, either.
Meanwhile, the rest of us met up and after literally a half an hour of deliberation, when we deliberated basically nothing, we ended up electing to go to the Jimmy Buffet store at The Flamingo. My cousin had instructed his parents to buy him a t-shirt there or something, so they purchased that and some shot glasses and then my uncles wanted to go see some old cars, so they went off to do that while my aunts went to the slots to gamble. This kind of left me on my own, so I spent the better part of the next hour wandering up and down the strip.
It was nice to walk around a bit, especially since today was the first time in the trip I felt like I could have worn shorts, but in spite of walking around in somewhat interesting scenery I was feeling lonely again and the part of the strip I was walking (basically between The Venecian and Bally's) is pretty familiar to me at this point, so I wasn't terribly entertained by what was happening around me. Mike rescued me on some level about a half an hour into my trudging along alone and I texted with him a bit the next hour or so. I"m kind of debating on wandering of the strip to see what potentially exciting and dangerous things are occurring around the bend, which my dad has pretty profusely told me not to do (which might have meant more to me three years ago) but I am still considering it. I enjoy some level of danger, after all...
After my little walk I ran into my mother back at the Flamingo and we decided to track down my dad, who had just gotten out of his poker excursion, back at Bally's. After we met up we headed downstairs to let me place some bets (3-3, won on Atlanta, Washington, and fewer than 63.5 total goals, lost on Phoenix (fucking OT), Minnesota (fucking OT), and Calgary (fucking 1 goal games). We went back to the room for a bit, and then headed down to the Venetian.
I took some pictures of the ceiling here for Em, although my blackberry camera, the lighting, and fellow tourists were not very helpful to this process and I may need to make a second (fourth?) trip later in the week in order to improve the results. We then went to The Venecian Cafe for dinner, which was surprisingly good and while obviously a drop off from last night, still held the high quality of dinners I've had in vegas. I had a soup with a creamy chicken-mushroom broth containing the previous ingredients, some peppery things and some oniony stuff, which was really good. The proportions for dinner were absolutely huge, and I barely got through mine, which was some sort of streak, some sort of oniony green vegetable thing, and some actual onions in a nice sauce and some spices, as well as some white rice that was pretty disappointing but with the rest of it I didn't particularly care.
At some point after this we headed to The Phantom of the Opera. I'm writing this offline so it's difficult for me to give specific examples without help from a scene list or a song list from google, but overall the performance was really impressed. You know with a performance at somewhere that is pretty well respected, be it Vegas, Toronto, Broadway, or whatever, you're going to get very quality acting and singing and orchestration, but each area kind of excels at its own thing, and for Vegas obviously it is pizazz. And pizazz it had indeed - each set was absolutely incredible, and wouldn't at all have looked out of place had I walked through it in one of the casinos, or in a highly detailed graphical environment on an RPG, or whatever. The trapdoors were amazing (to the point I was confused at how the Phantom was getting through them so quickly without appearing to be flung out of them - it was almost impossibly fast), the explosions were quick and vibrant and large, and the chandelier (which was bigger than my hotel room) crash was pulled off really well. The whole thing opened with said chandelier being assembled by the four parts of it, which began in different parts of the theater, getting dragged together up in the rafters by cables which was pretty cool. The Phantom's little area was another really impressive scene - the candles, which certainly weren't actually candles, looked perfect and wispy from where i was at, and some of the candles were raised out of the "water' into little candelabra/chandelier things during the first scene down there - it was very neat. The illumination on the mask as the last scene there ended up was very nice as well. The whole performance was pretty perfect and exactly what I would expect from vegas - excellent acting and music, and absolutely out of this world lighting and sets and special effects.