I recently returned from a glorious 10 day journey to San Francisco and Vegas with some of my best friends. I'll do my best to summarize, but I still have a feeling this is going to be a very long post (but then again, I have some serious post making-up to do..)
I arrived in San Francisco Saturday evening, and the city looked just as I remembered it to be. Cold, windy and foggy, but still bustling with life. That night was pretty low-key as some of my friends were working and one was in the East Bay for her mother's birthday party. So we had a dinner of pizza and beer in the Mission and called it a night.
Sunday, the three friends I was staying with all had to work, so I wandered about the city on my own. One definite advantage to visiting a city you lived in for awhile is knowing how to get around on your own.
I walked from Lower Haight all the way to my old neighborhood in the Tendernob, up to Fisherman's Warf and all over the Marina. It was quite the walk..!
We left for Vegas on Tuesday morning and stayed until Friday night. Vegas was... unlike anything I've ever seen. I think the closest thing I could compare it to would be Disney Land.
All of the buildings are enormous. There were several occasions when we just needed to get to the hotel/casino just across the street, but getting there took about a 1/2 hour. There are escalators and moving sidewalks everywhere, and when given directions, everyone would tell us it was too far (or impossible) to walk there. I thought that was very interesting.
I think the majority of the reason why it was "impossible" to walk anywhere was because of the heat. I've never experienced heat like Vegas. It was over 110 degrees every day. It made me feel like my skin was burning even though we all applied liberal amounts of sunscreen, and I was infact, not burned at all.
Instead of cafés and restaurants having heater lamps like they do here and in San Francisco, everywhere we went had mister sprays. They worked surprisingly well to help cool you down.
But to really sum up Vegas in a nut shell, all you do there is walk around and check out the hotels and spend money eating and gambling. All of the hotels have giant casinos as their lobby, and each one is based on different themes. We stayed in the Luxor hotel, which is the giant Pyramid - and therefore Egyptian themed.
Luxor:
Paris:
MGM:
Caesar's Palace:
The absolute highlight of our trip was seeing The Beatles Love Cirque du Soleil. Oooh man, it was so awesome! I was on the edge of my seat for the full 2 hours. It was the most amazing performance I've ever seen, hands down. If I ever go back to Vegas, I would spend far more time seeing the shows.
I suppose I should also mention that another highlight of mine was winning $100 playing roulette on our last day in Vegas. It was really more like our last 1/2 hour in Vegas.. so that was a definitely the best note to go out on.
The last few days of my trip were spent back in San Francisco with my amazing friends. I did make a point to drag them along with me to go check out some of my favorite galleries and eat at the best sushi restaurant of all time, Miyabi in the Castro. (although, they didn't need much persuading to go to sushi, that's for sure.)
Galley 1988:
White Walls/Shooting Gallery:
Double Punch:
One of the last days I was there, my friends introduced me to Ike's Place, which unfortunately is closing down due to not having the correct permits. Ike's is (or should I say, was) this amazing hole-in-the-wall sandwich place that always had a line a block long. We ordered a head of time and took our sandwiches to Dolores park to enjoy.
Since we were close to the Mission, we decided to go check out the fire damage from a huge fire that happened the day before. We later learned that a disgruntled evictee went back to his place and set his mattress on fire. Luckily no one was seriously hurt, but now 20 some odd people are homeless. :(
To liven ourselves up after that, we walked around the mission and check out some of the old favorite shopping spots and watering holes. We also discovered this really amazing print shop co-op, Levi's Workshop.
Well, that about sums up my trip. I think I'll end this ridiculously long post with some lovely photos, and hopefully it won't take me another month to post again.
Cheers!
Karen
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