JB's Blog

Stays in Vegas.

Hence I can’t really comment much of what’s happened the past day – I guess calling it a blur would be the easiest way to explain it. Instead I’ll post numerous photos of Vegas.

This is the NY:NY, the hotel we’re staying in – we’re staying in one of those towers. The hotel is freaking huge – and has some kick ass bars. On of the pubs has duelling piano’s! There is one giant piano that has two keyboards on each side where two pianists hit it off between each other and you can place money on the table to have your request fore filled. Dan found the best way to be beat the pack by laying $10USD on the table straight up – though the pianists had difficulty with the ACDC requests.

With the fourth of July coming up soon there are American flags EVERYWHERE! Even the MGM (largest hotel in the world – 5500 rooms or so) changed their logo to a rolling USA flag.

It’s quite spectacular, I’m amazed how much Americans are patriotic and proud of their country. I guess fighting for your independence with blood changes things. With all these flags I would love to hang a small Australian flag off our car as we tour around – but we’d probably be beaten up by gangsters

There was one cool little toy I picked up today at a ‘GameStop’ which had heaps of cool toys you only read about in Australia (like portable Gamecube screens for $99!). I grabbed a Special Edition Gameboy SP NES!

It looks awesome, quite authentic looking NES – and also very handy for our latest car fad; Advance Wars 2. Now with two Gameboys and a link cable we can have battles in the car – so far I’ve lost every game so I think I’ll confiscate the gameboys until I stop sucking.
This may not happen for a while.

Franger found his way home in the wee hours of the morning and we packed up our gear and got the car. The hire car is a huge Chevy venture van with plenty of room to move and funky automatic opening sliding doors. I can see we’re going to have problems in NY:NY when Lauren arrives and we have 6 people and bags – I’m sure we’ll handle it though.
Wilko offered to be the designated driver which is handy for me as I can write and play in the back seat. So far we’ve had no issues with driving, though it does look like someone has backed into our car. Nothing major, just a mark.

Franger decided to strip for half the trip, which made for some interesting photos. This is about the least revealing shot of Franger we had.

We meet up with Dan in Las Vegas! Due to communication break downs and slowness we managed to leave him alone in Vegas in the lobby for over 10 hours. Lets just say that it took him a little while to warm up to us after spending 10 hours stewing in how he’ll kill us. He’s still good old Dan though on first observation, will have to test his metal to see if America has changed/jaded him at all.

We’re staying in the New York tower in New York, New York hotel. The hotel is huge, with about five distinctive towers in the building with different themes – plus a roller coaster running through them all. The rooms are quite nice and clean with pretty big beds – handy as we’re sleeping with each others. I thought I’d take a photo of the TV though:

You can’t even watch TV these days without Windows crashing! Crazy Americans and their dependancy on Microsoft Windows, I’ve even found ATM’s using the silly OS. The amount of times I’ve seen a windows device crash during this trip in America….

Greg managed to show the Americans how to drink at the one of the many NY:NY bars by downing beers in less then 10 seconds a beer and then some. Needless to say, he was absolutely trashed. There are a huge amount of bars just inside our Casino, walking outside in the dark in Las Vegas is like walking during the day with sooo many bright neon’s and lights. Will have to take some pic’s.

I went to bed fairly early at 01:00ish trying to get a half decent sleep for our early trip tomorrow. Even though I’ll be able to sleep in the car on the way to the grand canyon I’m really trashed and needed a few hours shuteye.

Quote of the day: "Weeeeeee!"

Had a nice trip to DISNEYLAND today! We didn’t plan to go to Disneyland before we came to America but the opportunity looked to enticing. It was a overcast Monday so we thought that Disneyland wouldn’t be too crowded.
Franger left and visited a family friend of his so the group was reduced to four. This was advantageous for Disneyland as rides were typically either four or two seats so it worked out fine.

Our bus that dropped us off at Disneyland made us repeat the name of our return bus ‘Mickey and Friends’ about three or four times. It was quite funny having a big burley black man say ‘This is very important, do not forget – Mickey and Friends’. He didn’t appreciate me bursting out in laughter/giggling during his speech. When we got the entrance gate it was so cool seeing Disneyland again, quite a few things have changed since I came four years earlier. There is even McDonald’s in the park now! I’m pretty sure the boys were impressed with the look of Disneyland, though with all the lack of sleep didn’t help matters.

Fast passes are awesome. Normally a typical line up for a good ride is about one to one and a half hours. Whilst the waiting is entertaining and you have a great opportunity to talk to some American families, it can be a little of a downer. Luckily Disney has solved this since I was last there with the Fast Pass. You stick your entry ticket into a Fast Pass machine near the ride and it’ll spit you out a ticket with a time when you can come. You can’t choose the time when you want to go, but when you do go with a fast pass you wait time is about 15 minutes. Without the fast pass we wouldn’t have gone on as many rides as we did, thank god for fast passes!

My favourite ride was the Indiana Jones ride, it had a good mix of suspense and adrenaline. You’re in a big jeep driving around in a maze. Awesome special effects and animatronics – even a fireball inferno that we drove around. I had the biggest smile on that ride.
One of the awesome rides we went on was Splash Mountain. It’s a pretty typical water rafting ride, except like everything in Disney has heaps of animatronics and lots of work. I decided to make the ride a little more interesting by grabbing the water and splashing it on Wilko and Ben. This resulted in a battle of epic proportions, I’m amazed I came out as dry as I did – even though it did take a few hours to dry my pants afterwards.

Apologies about the quality of the photo, we took it in a hurry on the preview screen – though later the boys decided to grab some souvenir photos.
Unfortunately some of the bigger rides in Tomorrow Land (my favourite section) were shutdown due to major upgrades scheduled for re-opening in 2005. This was quite disappointing – the upgrades were for their 50th anniversary next year. I’m quite keen to find out what the upgrades are, though I don’t think I’ll be coming back to Disneyland any time soon.

In Disneyland there are heaps of various things to look at and buy. Lots of characters and happy faces, a real positive atmosphere. One of my favourite things about Disneyland are the bands and music. When the sun goes down, the bands cranks up. In Tomorrow Land there is a burger bar where a huge statue raises and underneath pops up a band called Voyager. Awesome music of most of the latest hits, really great to listen to munching on a cheeseburger.

After twelve hours of running a muck in Disneyland it was time to come home. At about 21:30 the lights of all of Disneyland dimmed and a huge fireworks show began. I never thought you could make fireworks in the shapes of mickey or hearts, but you can!

The magical kingdom was cool and everyone left with a little piece of Disney. Ben the most, he cursed me for leaving him alone in a Disney store and came out with a significantly lighter wallet.

Was a huge day – time for some rest… I had such a great time seeing Disneyland again, it’s such a ‘magical’ place. Hopefully Franger will be back in the morning so we don’t have to put out a ‘wanted’ poster.

After two full days we thought we’d have a nice light day of walking around and checking out some stuff at L.A. After waking up at 10am (someone had a great idea of drinking beers in bed the night before till the wee hours of the morning) we caught a cab to City Walk.
City Walk is beside Universal Studio’s and is basically a strip of shopping centres. It’s pretty big and has lots of movie related wares to buy.

It’s not all that big (about 40-60 shops), though it has lots of character and a nice feel to it. There was even a huge Billabong store with overpriced Billabong wares and a artificial beach with waves. An awesome shop had heaps of transformers gear with shirts and even a steering wheel cover. Wilko picked himself up an awesome ‘Grimlock kick butt!’ shirt. Bastard beat me to it.

Imagine that, Wilko and I danced at city walk – I was walking past and some guy was yelling for competitors so I volunteered of course not knowing what the hell was going. I don’t think the host understood my accent as he kept calling me ‘Jose’ from some unpronounceable location. I’m sure the video footage from Greg’s HandyCam will be entertaining as they got me to dance to some prissy girly music. I tried to find the beat, but failed dismally. Luckily Wilko and I were able to cheat by having another three Australians in the crowd screaming for us when the host asked which were the best.

We used the $25USD to good use by heading to ‘The PIG’ restaurant and buying every type of soda they had and a bowl of fries. The guy didn’t understand we wanted every different soda; we found some awesome flavours of different stuff. The different root beer we had tasted more like sarsaparilla which was a nice taste.

In City Walk we found one of those booths where you take photos and send to friends, so we thought it would be a good idea to cram 5 into that little booth. It took a little effort, but we were able to cram everyone fairly well into the photo. Of course there is another matter of looking at the camera when the picture was taken…

Pardon the look on my face, I swear I wasn’t on shrooms. Though I did see some awesome Nintendo NES Mushrooms for sale in various stores at City-walk. Just as well I held my hand away from my wallet otherwise I may not have bought half the gaming clothing!
After City Walk we took the underground train to Hollywood Blv. The underground train stations had awesome surroundings – ranging from California history to movie stories. The trains themselves were very clean and quick. Being underground had some pressure changes which hurt my ears a little, I guess all the air coming in and out as well as being half a mile underground does these things.

Walking up and down Hollywood Blv was pretty awesome. There was the chinese theatre which had heaps of movie stars hand and foot prints and heaps of movie magic. For a mile or so there were gold plaques embedded in the sidewalk pavement with names of entertainment stars throughout the ages. I couldn’t find the ‘Governators’ (what the Californians call Arnie) plaque, but I’m sure he’s somewhere special.
There was this cool Adult Museum which had a history of Adult toys throughout the ages. We didn’t get time to check it out, and the $11USD were probably best spent on our dinner anyway – but I hope that I’ll be able to check it out one day. It looked entertaining and quite tasteful!

There surprisingly not many ‘mega stores’, most stores were for boutique things or tourist stuff on the strip. I guess not many Californians shop on the strip – but there were heaps of shops anyway.
As Greg put it well, the stuff you go searching for in Australia is freely available and just there in America. And this is just downtown L.A., who knows what will happen when we get to N.Y./N.Y.!

We got lost on the Train. Apparently West Hollywood (our hotel location) is completely different to Hollywood West. Ones a gay capital of L.A., the other is a Ghetto, and both are completely opposite locations to each other (we later found out that West Hollywood could have got us killed, so I guess it’s good we didn’t go there). Thanks to a nice American who told us on the train to ‘Turn around man, you are going the wrong way!’ we made it back to our hotel after a 2 hour walk. It might seem long in writing but we checked out all kinds of stuff on the way back – lots of clubs and cafes of all types of walks of life.

Another awesome day, tomorrow is Disneyland which I’m really excited about… I just wish we would have a few more hours of sleep instead of 5.

Quote of the day: "Man I don’t have my passport…" – Franger as we are about to cross the border to back to the U.S.A.

We went to MEXICO! And even came back with a few stories to tell! If there was only one sentence for this day it would be that Tijuana was an experience.

It was a long and bumpy journey on the highway to the Mexico border. I’m not sure if it was mini bus we were in or the quality of the highway but man was it bumpy! So bumpy in fact my Powerbook didn’t survive the journey, I switched it on for about 60 seconds and then it crashed – turns out that it bumped out the airport wireless card enough to ruin the system. Took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong with it when we got back to the hotel room, but it’s all good now. So I can proudly say my Mac made it through Mexico!

There’s one long strip in Tijuana which is a mecca for tourists. In fact it is pretty much the only safe place to be in Tijuana for gringo’s and we’re told for our safety not to stray to far from there. Pity because I wanted to visit the bull ring, but it wasn’t recommended for first time visitors.
First thing you’ll realise when you walk on the strip, is that you’re everyone’s Amigo. Second thing you’ll realise is that you’re realise is that you’re going to be saying no a lot.
Like any place where people are poor there is lots of competition. Mexican’s were all over us trying to entice us to walk in to their bar or buying their wares. They were so aggressive in trying to get us there they would try to stop us and pull us in. Nothing a simple ‘no’ wouldn’t cure, but if you even glanced at an item there would be a Mexican telling you everything about it.

And they were smart negotiators as well, pulling all kinds of tactics on us. Australians by nature are very placid negotiators and our group found it difficult to get what we wanted. We were either too silly (I’m in a hurry but I want this cheap…) or to rude (walk away after a counter offer). Even some Mexican’s didn’t accept our offer after bartering for a while and saying that we couldn’t buy from them for any price. No problem though as you can buy the same junk in most stores.
I learned after walking the entire strip that after 100-200 metres of walking into shops you’ve seen 90% of the entire strip. Vendors seem to all have the same junk everywhere, they must all buy the same stuff from a warehouse.

We found a nice little restaurant which was hidden away of the main drag and didn’t have the hustle and bustle of Mexicans asking you for another shot of tequila or else. The food was different then expected, but everyone left satisfied.

We even tried some Mexican SOL beer, which is similar to Corona except comes in two seemingly random alcohol percentages. One in 4.6% and one in 6.2%; just a lucky draw whichever you get I suppose.

We even ventured into a adult bar where we were able to have many Corona’s on the cheap. An interesting tactic the guy at the front pulled on us when we got in was that he took us to the darkest most dimly place in the joint and sat us there. Returning with a bucket of drinks he asked for $20 USD. No problem, except that it was so dark and American money looks mostly the same… You can see where the con is here of course.
Luckily most of us fold our notes away and know where most notes are. That and we had freaking bright Mobile phones when which turned on lighted exactly what we wanted. Don’t try and mess with the yobbo’s mate. (Disclaimer: Don’t think anyone of us really classify’s as a yobbo but…)

As we waited in line to head back to the USA, Franger and Greg decided to check out some last minute alcohol shopping. Nothing spectacular, except that when Franger put his wallet in his pocket he dropped his passport on the floor. Greg being the thoughtful bloke he his picked it up without telling him he had it. Five minutes later Franger was in a panic searching for his passport and retracked his steps. Luckily Greg gave his passport back after a few minutes of panicking and I got some of it on film… Let’s just say that Frangers relationship with Greg was a little ‘strained’ after that.

It took over an hour in a half in a bus to travel less then two miles to cross the Mexican border back to the USA. It seemed like there was an issue in customs that their scanning machines were busted. When we eventually got to customs they were just checking passports and letting people in, which was excellent. Didn’t want any complications crossing the border.

Pretty tiring day – even though we only technically spent under five hours in Mexico, there was a lot of travelling and a lot hustle and bustle. Glad we went to Mexico even if it was ‘fake’, it did give me a snapshot of Mexico itself and it’s people.

The international flight from Brisbane to Los Angeles has been OK. Have had two nice Americans sit on either side of me and have had a good old chat (about 30-50 years old each). Whilst the conversation hasn’t been exactly flowing it has been quite interesting – Americans certainly are different to us, especially in work ethic. Of course, that’s an over-generalisation but like any person I can only talk about what I experience!

When I went through the new beefed up security check-point in the Brisbane domestic terminal I was randomly chosen for an explosive test. Basically sniffed over with an electronic vaccum as well as my bag – was fairly quick (less then two minutes) but what was strange was that when the officer pulled me up he gave me a piece of paper and told me to read it. It was just an explanation that I was one of the lucky few who looked like a terrorist and needed to be sniffed. I just found it weird that he couldn’t have told me that rather then read a piece of laminated paper.

So far there’s been a few little developments since our group of merry travellers left Brisvegas. Arriving in Sydney we decided to pool our money together and purchase a new Sony TRV-22 Handicam duty free. We were even able to bargain for a carry case and battery in the deal. Greg says he’ll pay for it all when we return back to Australia – so I guess you could say it’s actually Greg’s camera. But for now it’s the groups Camera – hopefully we’ll be able to get a few nice movies.

Adam has proved to be yet again – controversial. This time the poor sod got himself searched at Customs in Sydney. Nothing too bad, just a swiss army knife in his backpack! Not a small one either, blade length about 5". What’s scary is that he unknowingly brought it with him through the Domestic flight to Sydney! Just goes to show that accidents do happen.
That isn’t the half of it though – Franger and Wilko managed to get seats together and thought it was wise to have a drinking competition. In a nut shell, Wilko lost. Perhaps it was the 9 mini-bottles of Vodka and Rum in 3 hours or perhaps it was the high altitude. Either way, Wilko made friends with the ‘Lavatory’ for quite a bit of the flight.

—- BREAK —-

Okay so I’m now in the hotel, and everything is fine. The hotel is nice, and it looks like Franger, Greg and I will be able to share the two double beds by combining forces and having Greg sleep in the middle. Hopefully it won’t be too long before he’ll fall in the gap and be crushed to death.

We went walking around our street – Santa Monica Blv. It’s quite nice, open spaces and lots of stuff to see. What we quickly found out though – is that this is the Gay capital of L.A.. Greg has made us sworn to never tell anyone we’re staying in the Gayest place in L.A., but I think it’s okay for us to know. The only problem is as a group of five guys walking around, we get some ‘suggesting’ looks from Gay couples and guys walking around.

Later on we walked to this place called the Beverly. It’s a shopping centre 7 stories high with 5 stories of car parking. The remaining 2 stories has lots of boutique and expensive shops, including an awesome Sony store! Man there was an AIBO there, cute little bugger.

We we asked around for some greasy fat American burgers, and found something pretty cool.

As the photo suggests, I’m a bit tired after 30 hours of being awake; but after a nice greasy Johnny Rocket double blast off meal I’m good to go!
It was a very ‘American’ place, with American stuff all around. I can only say this after years of watching American movies and stuff, but it ‘smelt’ American. Franger managed to score himself an Authentic Johnny Rocket cup.

Being the sensible Jet lagged Australian’s we are, we caught up with some of Frangers overseas friends and headed out to a pub… err I mean bar. Place was called ‘Barnies Beanery’ or something, and it was full of American junk on the roofs and walls. Had a few pints of beer there, tasting all types of foreign beer. Took a little while to realise the ‘light’ beer actually means ‘Low Carbs’ (everything here is low carbs, even freaking beer!) and doesn’t mean low alcohol level. Ben realised after seven ‘lights’ the Americans were giving him, he was getting pissed off that he was getting drunk over lights – but thought it was cool that he’s drinking ‘good’ beer.
Had a game of air hockey and ‘foosball’ with various Americans, and it was fun. Franger and I had a fast and furious game where Franger managed to smash the hockey puck off the game table and into a waitresses head. She was okay after a few drinks but swore that Franger was going to get his ‘ass kicked’ by her boyfriend. I was waiting for a gun to be pulled or something.
Of course there was the ‘USA vs Australia’ foosball game, where regrettably we lost – but I guess it’s more of an American game then Australian and they did have a home ground advantage. Next time you USA dogs!

So time to get some freaking sleep now….. I have a funny feeling sleep is going to be a precious commodity this whole trip. But so far, it’s been awesome!
WATCH OUT AMERICA, HERE COMES THE ‘AUSSIES’!!!!