Viva Las Vegas

Las Vegas effectively is  like Disney World for grown-ups. The Strip (Las Vegas Boulevard with all the hotels on it) is catering for 2 things, and 2 things only 24 hrs a day: consumption & entertainment. We went for 5 days as some friends of us from Sakhalin where due to get married in Vegas, so the prime target for us was not necessarily the gambling, but of course we needed to see this legendary place!

The trip started off in style as Eelco and I both landed straight into the 'boys' and 'girls' night out in preparation of the wedding upon arrival.  We where staying at the Bellagio (from Ocean's 11 the movie) and the girls night was in one of the stylish restaurants in the hotel with some civilised activities after such as watching the fountain show, some cocktails and some mild Roulette with the left over kitty money (NL-se 'pot'). Eelco joined the guys who where touring the strip in a stretched expedition (limo version of his car) and visited, as you must do as a guy in Vegas, some of the bars with 'barely dressed ladies'. 

The day after we started testing all the amenities of our hotel (these places are HUGE!) and had to go and get a tux sorted for Eelco. And of course, when they bring you back from the tuxido rental place to your hotel,....they do so in a limo...

After a relatively relaxed day and more pampering in the hotel spa, some time in the hotel pool and more good food it was time for the wedding the next day. Eelco made me wear my 'normal' dress for wedding parties as it made my belly even more visible and he loves that......
Me & baby J taking some pictures of the other wedding guests in front of the little chapel (and no the wedding was not conducted by Elvis!)
The wedding ceremony was short but pretty normal. There where some 30 guests in total and after the wedding we toured the strip for a little in 2 stretched hummers (limo versions of the horrible Hummers). The wedding reception was in the Stratosphere hotel at the 107th floor of the tower at that hotel with amazing views over Las Vegas. On this 107th floor they even have 2 fun rides! One is a big shot that shoots you in a seat up a pole even higher - on top of the tower, and the other is a quickly turning spider looking thing which is hanging over the edge of the tower - so you are looking down 107 floors whilst being spun around at insane speeds! Baby J was not allowed on any of the rides so I got of lightly,....Eelco did the big shot thing and of course LOVED IT!
at the wedding reception (me already somewhat tired with my alcohol free O'Doualls)
Elvis did come to the wedding to sing a few songs,....the mother of the pride was dying to get a picture with him, so we all got one.....Can you see the DJ as well in the background? Or is it Donald Trump? We still don't know if that hair was real!
The day after the wedding we spend lazy by the pool, this time at the Paris hotel where we moved for the weekend (the Bellagio became too expensive at USD 599 / night!). The pool was at the 3rd floor of the hotel - just under the replica Eiffel tower (1/2 the size of the real one!). It was the first real hot day in Vegas (40C) so Eelco spend the day with sun & shade management for me and the belly. In the evening we saw a Cirque de Soleil show and had a fancy and very good dinner. Our waiter, an elderly Italian man, explained us that his American guests in the restaurant only come 'to eat',....not 'to dine' like us.....
we also tried somewhere in the process to see at least some of all the other themed hotels. In the above picture I am in Venice (well in the Venetian / Palazzo). And the below is the ground floor of the Paris with all the slot machines and the mandatory 'fake sky'.
So - all in all - would we recommend Vegas? Would we go again? Well, it all depends. Vegas is no fun if you do not have some disposable cash or to go to with kids. Everything you do or look at costs money. The place does attract a certain amount of American equivalent of the Dutch & British charter flight audience and at the strip you see 24 hrs a day people hauling 1 m tall plastic cocktail glasses around - taking the opportunity to drink outdoors in the US. On the strip you frequently pass rows of 20 or so Southern American looking folks handing out little cards for Hooker services and in the nice hotels minimum betting at the tables is from USD 10 a bet to USD 50 / 100 minimum in the weekend. The 'old' vegas at Freemont Street (where the Golden Nugget s and the older bond movies are filmed etc) actually has more charm we thought. The hotels at the strip are nice, but please realise in advance you are one of the 5000 guests and unless you booked the private villa or the executive floor there is no special treatment. So we had a good time and enjoyed seeing the place and our friends and the good food and the time off - but it was somewhat over the top for us Dutchies and not in the charming way - just the ultimate American consumerism on show. One good thing - mr Phillips must have made some decent money in Vegas - the amount of light bulbs in the place must be trillions and Eelco won USD 56 at the Airport on the way back. (There are even slot machines next to the luggage belt upon arrival!)

Crime

So Eelco and I went on a 'Romantic' date yesterday morning. Visiting the annual OTC, which is the biggest Offshore Oil & Gas Exhibition in the world for some networking, catching up with old friends, learning & freebies (which looked way better in the time that Oil was over USD 100 / barrel by teh way - back to pens & stickers mainly).

On the way back from OTC to Downtown where I was to drop of Eelco we got stuck in a traffic jam. The cause appeared to be some 15 Police cars on the road and a dead body covered by a sheet on the sidewalk with the yellow numbered signs as you see in CSI etc. We where quite upset from the whole scene and did not see much but nevertheless thought something like this was/is a major event.

Turns out not so in Houston. 1 day later is is just an article on page 3-4 of the local news - whilst it was a cop killing a suspect and an innocent bystander with baby in stroller got hit in the process in a decent area of town! Clearly not so special for the Houstonians as today we have new shootings on the front page - several - of which 1 homeowner shooting 3 people in his yard over a dispute over DVD's! And the worst part - most people who comment on such news on the sites think this is all ok?!?!?

Don't think we'll ever get used to the normality of guns and gun use here in Houston....don't even want to try!
http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou090505_mh_rice-metro-shooting.2099e3ee.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6408742.html

PGA Houston Open (Golf)

Golf, is it a sport, past time or torture method? I don’t know but it seems to be all three sometimes. Here in Houston it is a big thing and many people play it . The thing with golf is that most people suck at it but very few give up on it. It appears to be very addictive. I started playing in Scotland and picked it up again here in the US. In fact, the second day I started working here I was on a golf course playing with my new colleagues. The issue is that even if you seem to get progressively worse, like me, you sometime do hit a perfect shot…Maybe only a few every 18 holes you play, but it does keep you hooked and you think, you see, I can do this and I will get better at it. I do hope I will get better some day and improve my handicap of somewhere optimistically speaking around the 26 mark. It’s a strange term I think ‘handicap’, it should be more like ‘inadequacy’ , ‘inability’ or ‘incompetency’.

Anyhow, as I said, it is a big thing here in Houston. Texas is a perfect place to play since there is plenty of space and at least it rains enough to keep the fairways lush and the greens green. Our current employer actually sponsors a big event every year here in Houston called, obviously, the Shell Houston Open. It is held every year one or two weeks before one of the biggest tournaments of the year, the Masters, which has been played the last few years in Augusta. The SHO is said to be played on a course where the grass, greens and “pin Placements” are made such that it mimics the course in Augusta. For this reason many top golfers flock every year to Houston to play the tournament here to prepare for the Masters.

Since our employer sponsors the tournament we were able to get tickets for one of the days of the main event. We went on the Sunday, when the last round is played and the eventual winner is determined. So Maartje and myself got in the car and drove on a sunny morning to one of the car parks of the Bush international Airport. I must say, it was extremely well organised. For 5 bucks a head there was transportation from the car park to the golf course 5 miles away. So we got there in the late morning sun, just like about 50.000 other fellow golf lovers in there air-conditioned SUVs, Crossovers or European station cars. It was like going to the races in Ascot. There seemed to be an unwritten dress-code of Sneakers, white socks, khaki shorts, a colourfull polo-shirt neatly tucked into the shorts and the unmistakable cap and sunglasses. Preferably a cap that boasted proof of witnessing another golf tournament in the US. Every one seemed to be pretty serious about putting sunscreen on the skin that normally only sees artificial light and air. we brought our own but were too excited to put some on. We were all corralled into the busses whilst some very serious looking marshals were telling us over and over again to leave out cell phones and cameras in the car. This did put some people in a an apparently very scary, naked and unfamiliar position.....they would not be able to check their emails, call their pall to tell them what to get at the beer tent or text them that they were 50 yards further down the fairway of the 6th hole....How can you survive?????? Anyway, we did not have to get back to our cars to leave our brain, agenda, address book and photoalbum in the car. There were about 30 busses able to carry 50 people ready to take us to the battlefield so after about 1 minute wait we took the first one available. On our way, getting close to the course we witnessed that we were in fact the lower class people since there was a queue of about 100 European SUVs, vintage supercars and limos waiting to get to the exclusive car park for special guests or just very wealthy spectators. Upon arrival we met up with a colleague of mine and his golf loving brother-in-law who we met based on a mobile phone-less appointment...”See you at eleven at the Shell tent with the free food and drinks”.

I must say the course looked stunning. The grass was greener than even the neighbours’ neighbours and every bit of vegetation seemed to be coiffured by a celebrity stylist.  And all this to make it as difficult as possible to get this little white ball from a small patch of grass on one side of a lake into a little hole 500 yards away. But man, these guys can hit a ball. We followed a flight of Geoff Ogilvy, Paul Casey and other Aussie bloke from the first hole to the 7th. It was pretty impressive I must say. I am getting nervous when I need to hit a ball from the tee and I can see my own shadow standing there arse back, knees bent and trying hard NOT to the hit that ball as hard as I could. These guys can swing when there are 250 pairs of eyes looking at their every movement. Ok, nobody speaks, breathes, moves or even blinks when they are ready to hit, ushered by the marshals holding their hands in the air as if they were a director of a symphony orchestra just before the first note is played. But we overheard the caddy of Ogilvy telling him that he should aim for that guy over there, about 300 yards away wearing a red shirt. He had to clear 230 yards of design jungle, a river and some sandy holes with neatly arranged pure white sand grains probably imported in an climatised container from some bounty island... But he did! He did aim for that guy and managed to drop the ball about 3 feet from hist new balance sneakers. Incredible! From there he hit it in one silky stroke onto the snooker smooth green, about 5 feet from the hole. Ok, I am not saying that these guys really “earn” their money, but it is certainly impressive. In fact the most impressive thing is not so much the perfect shots flying right where it should be, no, it is the fact that there is sometimes a glimpse of human nature, where they hit the ball in an awkward spot next to the toilet tent or in between some trees but then are able to recover and still send this little ball flying to the green. It doesn’t really matter where they land. Unless it is in the water, they’ll still manage to “par” the hole from a bunker.

It turned out that we picked a good group to follow as it contained the eventual winner, Paul Casey. He did play a very good round but moreover, he is British and not american, which, with his Aussie companions, made them less interesting to watch than some of the American players. We did see these masters swing from up close and saw perhaps some of the subdued rage surfacing when they did hit the water twice on one hole or missed this seemingly easy putt. Casey stayed one stroke ahead of the next contender, an american whose name I forgot, until the very last (72nd) hole. He birdied that hole and finished even with that other guys who finished his last round about two hours earlier. So it came to a sudden death play-off on the 18th. It was pretty tense since this hole is considered the most difficult hole in the PGA tour. It has a lake about 300 yards long and 50 yards wide with only a 15 yards of fairway on the right hand side. On the play off, the american hit the water and thereby lost two strokes. Casey hit the fairway and after two more shots didn’t even have to putt the ball when his opponent conceded and shook his hand. Casey just won about 1.2million dollars and some silverware. Not bad for four days work. It appeared that we witnessed the winning round of the new champion so we were happy as well. And again, the organisation was impressive. We headed back to the shuttle bus parking expecting having to wait for half an hour but we got into the bus within minutes and enjoyed the air-conditioning for the 10 minute trip to the car. Then we realised why all experienced spectators used some serious sunscreen or were supporting an “I-am-a-successful-retiree-and-play-6-rounds-of-golf-every-week-anyway”-tan. We were very sunburned. Even wearing the mandatory cap my face was bright red and I had an almost purple triangle underneath my chin where my poloshirt did not cover my Sakhalin-skin. It didn’t spoil the fun though. We did have a very enjoyable day and saw some impressive golf being played. Since then, my handicap has not improved at all but I do sometimes manage to hit that damn ball just where that imaginary guy with the red shirt is standing and see my (only) par of the round unfold... It is a “humbling game” someone said once and I was humbled by the control and accuracy of these pros. I am glad however, that I do have a day job that is not depending on dampness of greens, purposely dug water holes and raked beaches, but I’ll keep trying in the weekends!

Eelco