Viva Las Vegas!?

So, Vegas is horrible. Really. It has to be one of the most disgusting places on earth...and I'll give some examples. We checked into the Excalibur hotel...a make belief castle that's actually...well, yes, you've guessed it...ש Casino. Las Vegas is all about the fake, but not in a good way, you know...sometime fake can be fun, sometime it's better than the real thing, but in the case of Las Vegas nothing is farther than the truth. After checking into the hotel and taking a nap, we had tickets to see Cirque Du Soleil at Treasure Island so we decided to walk over there and see the strip on the way. From a purely urban design perspective, the strip doesn't work. Let me explain. First and foremost, the road and with it cars have taken over the strip. Sidewalks have been reduced to the absolute minimum, forcing people to walk in almost straight lines (one in each direction). What is even worse is that sidewalks are not continuous, as a matter of fact, every time you want to cross to the next sidewalk (and I'm not talking about crossing the road from one side to another, but staying on the same side), you have to go up stairs, cross a bridge and then go down the stairs. The bottom line, if you're old, handicapped, etc. you're screwed. The strip also has two very distinct sides - one side that's more reserved (that's the side where the Belaggio, Mirage and other Casions are) and another side that's full of illegal immigrants handing out business cards of call girls with the slogan "Direct Babes - call and get a woman in 20 minutes"...or something like that and an accompanying "exotic" picture. Anyway, whenever you pass by them, they tap their cards really hard on their hand, like some kind of signal and then push them in your face...at the end of the night, as we were walking back to the hotel, the sidewalk was completely covered with these business cards...

If you've never seen a Cirque Du Soleil show, you have to go! Trust us, you have to. We saw Mystere at Treasure Island and it was fantastic. It felt familiar in a way, I mean, it's essentially a clever combination of modern dance, gymnastics and circus...yet all three are weaved together to create a non-stop, breath-taking experience...truly magnificent! The show included a dynamic stage that kept revolving, going up and down and doing all sort of things. Costumes were crafted to complement the performers' part and at the end of the show a giant snail puppet emerged from beneath the stage and hoovered in a pool of smoke...magical! Bottom line, go see one of their shows.

The next morning we left Las Vegas, headed toward L.A. We stopped at yet another mining ghost town called Calico. Similar to Tombstone, Calico used to be a bustling metropolis back in the days of silver and burax, but today its population has shrunk to 9 (!). Once again, we went through the attraction, walked through another mine tour, rode the train and visited the shops. Nothing too exciting.

In L.A. we found a hotel smack in the middle of Chinatown...at first this seemed like a wonderful idea (especially because of the price per night) but in hind sight we should have “spoiled” ourselves with something better. Anyhow, the highlight of our L.A. experience is the Getty Center, which is a Richard Meier building, and as architects we spent most of the visit debating whether the building is “relevant” or not. I'm not going to go into the details of what we saw, however, it is a place you have to visit if you're in L.A. for several reasons. One, they only charge $15 for parking and then everything else is free, so you can spend a whole day just walking around the center without a care in the world. Two, the building is quite spectacular, I mean, Richard Meier has been doing the same thing for the last 40 or so years, so you can bet your ass that he's got this building down, baby. Third, it was refreshing to see a museum collection that was once someone's personal art collection and not some curator's “job”...meaning, almost all the pieces are things you can relate to, even to the point of (maybe) placing them in your living room (that is, if you are rich as Mr. Getty was...). I did want to show a picture I took of the building's model which stands in the entrance hall and to say a few words about its architectural merit. However, as I don't have access to Photoshop right now, I'll delay the discussion till we get back to Cambridge...

The rest of our L.A. experience is pretty forgettable, so if you're curious just check our picture on flickr. I will mention a rather questionable event in which we found ourselves doing laundry in the middle of the night in some stinky little laundromat surrounded by illegal immigrants who looked at us like we fell from the sky (little did they know that we're also illegal immigrants). This story has a happy ending, i.e., we got our laundry done and no one got hurt.

Our next stop was Sequoia National Park. The road up to the park feels like one of those optical illusions where the road had no end...we kept going higher and higher and at some point everything got covered with snow. Regardless, everything was forgot the minute we laid our eyes on one of those red giants! Wow! Now that's a tree! These things are enormous...I don't think one can fathom their size from pictures...they are so big, you just want to hug them and say “thank you, I know what you've been through.” Unbelievable. The park is gorgeous and includes many trails of which we did only a few and one that was especially difficult but totally worth was “Big Baldy”. The trail goes up the hill to a clearing in the woods called “Big Baldy” where you get the most spectacular view of the nearby mountains floating in a sea of clouds, with the warm colors of the sun spilling every which way and piercing the bluish sky. Breathtaking.

From Sequoia National Park we made our way to Morro Bay and the Pacific Ocean. We spent the night at Morro Bay and the next morning started driving up the coast on US-1, one of the most beautiful scenic routes in the country. We stopped at Hearst Castle, a genuine castle built by media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who used to entertain all the most important people up there and who also collected art and animals, like polar bears, tigers and such. We took the “Experience Tour” which included a walk through the castle's Gothic dining hall, Renaissance main hall and...ok, you get the picture. We've had several occasions during this trip to see rich people's homes and to conclude that the saying “you can't buy style” holds water. Mr. Hearst spent unimaginable amounts of money making something he saw in a magazine or that he visited in Europe. There was no personal saying in the castle other than “I have a shit load of money, look what I bought.” The interesting story about the castle though was Julia Morgan, the architect who designed it. During the tour we learned that Julia was the first woman to ever attend the Beaux-Art School in Paris, the Mecca of architecture back in those days. She was also a civil engineer and one of the first to build in reinforced concrete in California, a fact that earned her a solid reputation, given all the earthquakes in the area. So the funny thing is that Hearst castle, although it looks like something out of a fairytale, is actually a block of concrete...as a matter of fact, if you look closely at the walls of the main building, you'll notice that what looks like bricks are not bricks at all but concrete made to look like brick...they “drew” bricks onto the concrete. I call that irony.

After Hearst castle we continued driving towards Monterey and stopped along the way to watch Elephant seals on the beach. In case you didn't know, there is an Elephant seal association and they've built the most wonderful boardwalk on a beach where the Elephant seals return year after year to fight, mate and give birth. It was just amazing to see these HUGE animals scattered like rocks all over the beach. The males are gigantic with sharp teeth and a bad-ass attitude. The females look after their pup and stay close to the male...each male is surrounded by a few females and if other males come close to one of his females, well, bring it on...We were lucky enough to find one of the volunteers on the boardwalk to tell us a little bit about these magnificent animals. He said that most of the pups are about a week old and pointed to some who were dead and buried under the sand. He said that when the males start to fight, they trample over (and often kill) whatever is in their way. Scary. It was unusually interesting to see that the Elephant seal's flipper resembles a human hand and more than once we could see them scratching their nose in a very human-like fashion. We also learned that the seals occupy that beach all through the year but around Valentine's day, the males get restless and start fighting over females to mate with. That's when all the action happens. While on the beach, the seals do not eat, the pups are the only ones who get to nurse while the mothers lay almost motionless to conserve energy. Contrary to what we thought, the pups don't know how to swim, they stay on the shore until they're strong enough to get in the water. It was an awesome sight and we could have spent the whole afternoon standing on that boardwalk...unfortunately we had to move on.