Friday, 7/29
Guh, okay. Alright. No, I’m fine. Let’s get on with this.
When last we left our intrepid protagonist, he was nipple deep in caviar and Nordic gymnasts, giving the Old Spice guy dating tips.
Wait, I think that’s slightly off.
Last time, I was on the way to SF. Got there at about 8:30 at night, a mere three hours late (oh Greyhound). On the upside, we did get to drive in across the bay, and the view was jaw dropping.
Bam. Jaw dropped.
On the side that’s not the upside, being on the golden gate bridge makes it hard to get pictures of the golden gate bridge.
Pictured here using the Cloverfield technique.
I hoofed it the couple miles to the A & E European Hostel, right off Mission St., just in time to catch the last of the light.
Stowed my stuff, accosted the common room for companions, and managed to rustle up two Brits and a Taiwanese woman to go out with.
That's Heidi on the left, who said I look like Eminem, proving that we all look the same to them. Ryan in the middle, who didn't know you can't drink on the street in San Francisco, and Dave on the right, who didn't know San Francisco has a Gay scene, proving that the British shouldn't be allowed out of their country unsupervised.
We ended up at a low key sports bar, which had Lagunitas on tap. Spent a few hours there, headed back to the hostel when the bars closed and stayed up chatting with a drunk Swede (Dane? Norwegian? Something like that) and helping a middle aged Chinese woman make dumplings.
Drink: Lagunitas IPA. On. Tap. T. A. P. I can’t emphasize how important that is for me.
Bed: Top bunk in room 307, A & E European Hostel, SF. A little spendy, but nice. Only real criticism is that there’s only one shower stall per floor, so you’ll likely have to wait a bit.
City: San Francisco.
Final thoughts: Bay Area California
I'm going to lapse into Firefly talk for a bit, because that is how I filter the world. The Bay is a lot like the Core Planets; It is very very pretty, and everything is very clean and pleasant, but the whole place is weirdly repressive. You can't sit outside of designated areas in Santa Cruz, littering is a one *thousand* dollar fine, etc. The weather's awesome and the people were all great, I just don't think I could ever live there.
Saturday, July 30
Got up bright and early the next day to meet my rideshare, a lovely married couple somewhere in their late twenties. Ryan from Boston and Maria from Russia. I have no idea how they met, but I did spend the entire trip not making any mail-order jokes. Along in the back seat with me was Espie, an androgynous youth who was also ridesharing with us. We managed to make it to Las Vegas by about nine that night, and after forty five minutes of driving in circles while their GPS laughed at us, eventually found the Hostel Cat, on Las Vegas Boulevard almost dead center between Freemont and the Strip.
Hostel Cat was…different.
Primarily, I booked at Cat because, at 12 dollars a night, it was the cheapest place who’s reviews didn’t include words like “bed-bugs” and “herpes”, but I wasn’t discouraged by the fact that they also claimed to provide plenty of activities, making it easy for people who don’t know anybody in Vegas (me) to find companions. They were non-specific as to what these activities entailed on the website, but more than enthusiastic about them in person. Long before I ever got a room key, as I was signing in at the desk, Dustin, a young man who’s entire job at the Cat appears to be preventing any of the guests from being capable of operating heavy machinery, had handed me a red pong cup of what I’m pretty sure was Kamchatka and purple kool aid, and told me the bus was leaving in 15 minutes.
What bus, you may ask? Why, this bus:
That's Dustin on the left, or as the surly Brits I befriended insisted on calling him all weekend, Will I Am
Clearly, my crowd
Paulo on the left there is actually pretty awesome. Naturally, he immediately left the next morning
Took us up to Freemont St., which apparently used to be the Strip, but is now the cheaper, drunker little brother of the strip. The place was filled with the intoxicated middle class, but everything there still closes down by two.
That cowboy winks at you. It's creepy.
Anyway, the bus. On the upside, it was carrying pretty much everyone at the hostel, so it was a good way to get a social crash course. On the downside (you see how this works by now), it turns out that I hate almost everyone at the hostel, with the exception of a couple other people who also hate everyone else at the hostel. It was like if the Jersey Shore had been cast with indolent Europeans. I ended up ditching the crew after they dragged everyone into some awful, crowded, overpriced night club and hoofed it back to the hostel, after the first of many late night burrito stops. When I got back, the whole gang was there camping out at the picnic tables in the courtyard, continuing to do what was apparently the only thing any of them ever did in life: drink poorly.
Not pictured: drunken Eurotrash
The high point of the night was when I went back out with the manager of the place, who actually lives in vegas (most of the employees aren’t locals, but just work there to get free rent. Dustin had apparently showed up in September and, finally having discovered what he was meant for in this life, immediately became a permanent fixture), to a little local dive called Snick’s. Ostentatiously a gay bar, Snick’s quickly became my favorite place in the city. It’s quiet and low key, the staff are cool and really interesting to talk to, and tourists never ever go there.
Got back to the hostel in time to say hi to the people leaving for grand canyon tours, and crashed.
Drink: about eight different kinds of food coloring based mixed drinks. All of Vegas apparently parties like nineteen year olds.
Bed: top bunk (top bunks are cool) in room 16, which thank god is air-conditioned.
City: Las Vegas.
Sunday, 7/31
Woke up around 2:30, which, in my defense, was only seven hours after I went to sleep. Spent some quality time in the common room, updating you lovely people while the brain surgeons I was staying with watched youtube videos of drunk people hurting themselves on the flat screen. I left the hostel around 6:30, on my own this time, and headed south to the Strip proper.
The strip is its very own kind of special. First off, everything there is just fucking gigantic, like disturbingly huge. The casinos themselves are larger than the mall in the Lloyd center, and the hotels on top of them multiply that area by another hundred floors. Here, all of these are from outside or inside the first two floors of one place, the Venetian;
This is actually a room inside, at night. It freaked me out too
Pictured: the only gambling I did. Like you're surprised
It's a people watching bonanza; both the tourists, and the locals making money off the tourists.
It is, however, definitely an area where, if you don’t have just assloads of cash on you, you’re kept at arm’s length. It’s great fun to wander around, especially because you can drink beer on the street (which almost make up for the fact that there are literally no bars on the strip. There’s places in casinos and hotels which will serve you drinks, but there is not a single building whose sole purpose is to bar)
and there are a few free shows,
Yup, screw tops
Justin, here's your 5$ test
and there are a few free shows,
the Bellagio fountain show was honestly deeply moving; they managed to program the fountains so well they actually emote
but the entire area is designed for an atmosphere of exclusivity. You’re only cool if you’re in, and if you want to be in it’s not cheap.
Left the strip a little past midnight, wandered around until I found the monorail
Monorail!
which, second to the fountain show, was my favorite part of the whole area, and got back to the hostel in time to hang out a bit with two of the minority group there who I actually valued as humans, Clayton, the nerdy American pharmaceutical student, and Kev, the small manic Irish lad.
You may think that this sounds like the end of the night. You may also have a very low skill at pattern recognition. We got chatting about how much we already hated the Vegas scene, and how overrated it was, and how much we wanted to just find a regular bar, when we realized that the bars never close here and immediately set out to find a regular bar. Our approach was to, moth-like, be drawn to neon sign in the hopes that one of them would have a bar under it. We made a fatal mistake, however, in forgetting that we were in Las Vegas. The same way every Marina building looks like a Taco Bell, every Vegas business looks like a bar. We ended up at a laundry mat at one point because from a few blocks off, it honestly looked like a bar. Finally, we accidently ran back into Freemont, which had stopped being a place where things were happening three hours before, and were about to abandon all hope when we found this:
Yes my friends, on The Freemont Experience Street (the real name; it’s on the signs and everything) there is a building which contains a row of plasma displays attached to the three modern consoles, a grip of classic standups (the missile command one now has my initials in 2nd on the top scores, no big deal), a dance floor and a bar. With real beer. Not on tap, but at this point I’m learning to choose my battles. So, that was awesome.
Clayton and I left at about four or five when they closed (we had lost Kev a little earlier when he followed a redhead out the door) and ended the night with one more drink back at Snick’s again, which really really is my favorite part about Las Vegas.
Well, ended is a strong term. Went back to the hostel after, and found Ed, a Brit I had made friends with the night before, up with one of his traveling companions Patrick. Found out they were bitter misanthropes also, and immediately cemented a relationship.
Drink: Lagunitas! There’s almost no Oregon beer down there, but once in a while some Californian will get smuggled in.
Bed: Top bunk, bitches
City: Las Vegas
Monday, 8/1
I had originally intended to leave this day, but thanks to my two sisters (one biological, one other who doesn't even have that excuse) having fled to the west coast, I ended up at the Cat for one more night. I was moved to room 9, (don't worry, still got the top bunk), which turned out to be home of Ed and Patrick, as well as their two other mates Dave and John, all of whom are wonderfully deviant. We spent the afternoon in the room (A/C you know), drinking their beer and complaining about the hostel, the town and the basic state of the world. Eventually, we set out in one more attempt to find were the locals went. Finally, we broke the code; turns out the local bars are the only buildings that don't look like bars, using camouflage behavior to avoid tourists. After hitting up a couple dive bars, we went back to the hostel and (you know what's coming) sat around bullshitting until well past sunup.
Fun Fact: I have never been asleep in Vegas when the sun was down.
Drink: Miller Lite (the brits love it for some reason, but can't drink it at home without being rightfully mocked)
Bed: Top Bunk, room 9
City: Las Vegas
Final Thoughts: Vegas
Fuck. Vegas. Seriously. If you don't have money, it ends up being an entire city that feels like a nineteen year-old's house party. If you do have enough money to really take advantage of the place, you have enough to be somewhere way more interesting.
Spent Tuesday waiting for my 8 pm Greyhound to Tucson to show, then spent twelve hours hounding it to Tucson where I am now. Soooo, that's what I've been doing.
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