Sin City

"This old town's filled with sin; it'll swallow you in     
If you've got some money to burn.
Take it home right away, you've got three years to pay
But Satan is waiting his turn..."

-Gram Parsons "Sin City"

So our next stop was Vegas, baby, Vegas, which was not quite what we thought it would be. For example, I thought it was going to be a place where winning money is like stealing Dentyne from the elderly, but that it was not.



We hit some quick slots at the Gold Coast, expecting millions. Turns out we only wasted about $3. What gives?





Shortly thereafter, we realized that we couldn't afford to stay at the Gold Coast, which Lonely Planet told us was a "cheap, off-the-strip destination", and that we furthermore couldn't afford any of the big hotels because it was Friday and weekend rates had started. Instead, we had to stay here:



It wasnt as bad as it looks. There was no Gideon's Bible, which bummed Matt out, but there was sweet stationary, 6 channels of high-quality analog cable (showing Anaconda, with Ice Cube and J-Lo, SWEET), and only a few blocks from the Strip.

Lured by the promise of $1 roulette tables at the Westin, we made our way for Las Vegas Blvd. (turns out $1 roulette happy hour was over, actually). On the way there, we noticed the elegant Siren calling cards of Vegas's finest mature escorts, wedged gracefully in the fences...



Here they are, the beauties...



And here is where we ended up, the casino that destroyed us, left our souls vacant. A fiendish hellhole known as BALLY's... (*note: full quantity of Vegas monetary losses will not be mentioned in this post, or ever, because certain worryworts we call "mom" and "dad" are reading this.)



On a side trip from Bally's we saw Paris, the tackiest casino in the city... actual French streets and blue skies were replicated...


On the floor at Bally's. God bless the free drinks.



But the long and short of it, without going into too much detail, is that Las Vegas is an evil place, its denizens hell-bent boozehounds, and its owners greedy fiendish capitalists. This, we must admit, is our opinion only after failing, twice in one night, to get back to the black on our bets. So goodbye Vegas. Goodbye pimps on the casino floor...



Goodbye Coco and Christine, our lovely dealers at the $2.5o video-roulette tables...



Goodbye, unattainable Mirage...



Goodbye, Paris...



Goodbye, hot babes direct to me, girls who want to meet me, 24 hours, 7 days...



Goodbye, Strip. Goodbye.


Let's call in Gram again to finish things up...

"Well, I spend all night with the dealer
Tryin' to get ahead
Spend all day at the Holiday Inn
Trying to get out of bed
Ooh, Las Vegas, ain't no place for a poor boy like me
Ooh, Las Vegas, ain't no place for a poor boy like me
Every time I hit your crystal city
You know you're gonna make a wreck out of me..."

- Gram Parsons, "Ooh Las Vegas"

LA Taco City

Hello All,

Thanks for tuning in again to my blog, which I hope to keep going for a while this time.

For those of you who don't know, I am currently on a cross-country road trip from San Francisco to LA to Miami with my friend Matt from high school. I picked Matt up in LA, where he was staying with his brother, and I checked out the city for a day and a half. Didn't see much, as it turns out LA is unbelievably large, but we ate some good tacos and burgers. Here are pictures of them, along with a few sites.

There are dozens and dozens of taquerias and taco trucks around the city. We first went to Matt's brother's favorite, Cinco de Mayo, and sampled huevos rancheros:



Fish tacos and tacos al pastor (made with shredded pork)...

Matt digging in...



Later that night, on our way to Fatburger, we passed the freakiest building in LA... the Scientology Center in Westwood. Look how huge it is...



And finally Fatburger, SoCal's superior, or so I heard, alternative to In 'n Out.



They bill themselves as "America's last great hamburger stand," and have an appropriately vintage menu. Note how it is just as simple as In 'n Out's menu, but no secret menu options like "animal style" and "fries well done" as far as I could tell.


The burger, I have to admit, was better than an In 'n Out burger, but we're comparing apples and oranges, here, people. The fatburger is much bigger, with a thicker beef patty (it comes with steak fries, as well, not regular) and costs almost twice as much as InO. Here's a picture, in any case, so that you can imagine you are eating one. I can see your mouth watering...



And finally, another taco stand. Wee!

Land of Perpetual Dusk

Hello again!

The blog has been resurrected for some travels that I will be undertaking this summer and probably next year, in America and abroad. Read on, tell your friends (and mine) and as always, I love comments, so leave 'em.

Right now I'm in Copenhagen (København) Denmark (Danmark), studying with a fellowship called Humanity in Action, which is basically where we meet a lot of journalists, politicians, NGO workers, etc, and talk about minorities, immigrants, and human rights issues in Europe, and a bit about the Holocaust too, because it is seen as Europes biggest, baddest human rights disaster. We also have everything paid for, I'm living in an apartment with another guy, for example, and we have a host family in addition who feed us and take us out to dinner and are very nice in general, and we get a bit of money too... HiA takes care of us very well. So yeah, there is a bit of exorcism of white guilt through the mechanisms of white guilt involved.

Anyway, there are other HiA programs in Berlin, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Paris, and all of the fellows, from those and a few other countries, plus the Americans, started together about 2 weeks ago at a place called Krogerup Højskole, on the island of Zealand, just north of København, where there are littlel cottages along the coast and at night, the sea looks like this:




















The lights and land across the water are Sweden. Now Krogerup Højskole, which, by the way is completely unpronouncable, like most Danish, is what is called a Danish 'Folk School'. These are sort of a cross between community centers, continuing education centers, and boarding schools, and were invented in the Romantic 19th Century by some guy whose name is unpronouncable and who wanted to educate the rural peasantry. We stayed there because its a good place to house 104 people for a long weekend and have lots of lectures about human rights, and its very quiet and sprawling. The outside of our big mansion house / learning center looked like this, from a tree...
















And this, from the ground...















Inside, we had panels a lot. Like this one, which includes the Dutch and German Ministers of Integration, a French journalist and an American former prosecuter at the International Criminal Tribunal in the former Yugoslavia... all of whom are HiA board members, I believe.

















We stood and asked rather intelligent questions. Heres my current roommate, Mark, taking the floor...
















Outside, the conversations were lively. I call this 'Discourse Beneath the Oak':
















Discourse Part II
















Part III















Discourse is all we did, except play soccer...




















And visit a lovely seaside art museum called Louisiana....















Where we saw large striped modern sculptures (Ditte modelling)
















(Ditte blending in... also, it is obligatory for every Dan to own a black and white horizontally striped shirt)















And the coast of Sweden again. Pictured in this photo, I might add are Dmitro the Hilarious Ukrainian (front and center), who showed up in the first day of lectures in a full suit, but seeing that he stuck out, switched to a sleeveless vest-shirt with the word 'Longstory,' written in graffiti, inexplicably, all over it (unfortunately, I got no picture), and in the back ground, the pale guy with the black hair is called Garret, who describes himself as 'deeply immersed in the German goth culture,' a culture which I hope to become part of when I see him in two weeks in Berlin.





















I'm so very sorry that this is so brief, but now I am in Copenhagen, and I will try to blog soon from here, but my internet access is really limited. I'll try to return emails as best I can, and look forward to some good pictures.

Everyone take care,
Robbie

Paris Part 2 - The Food We Ate

I've come to realize that a good deal of my memories are about things that I ate in certain places. Even here in Pittsburgh, where I find myself now, I show new people around based on the locations of my favorite restaurants. My sister said it's because people's 'sensory memories' are the strongest, but that sounded like med school mumbojumbo to me.

In any case, here's a post about the things Kat and I ate in Paris, most of which were delicious.

The above picture is from a little cafe in the university district, the Rive Gauche, where our table water came in an empty jack daniels fifth and our wine in an honest-to-goodness carafe. We had the below risotto and duck confit for lunch...



I also got, before arriving in Paris, several emphatic recommendations for this place, L'As Du Fallafel. Lenny Kravitz trumpets it as the best falafel in the world (in a New York Times article taped to the front window), and it's located in Le Marais, the Jewish/Gay quarter down by the Hotel De Ville.



Appropriately filthy kitchen...



Appropriately fleet-handed falafel-slingers...



I took down two falafels for dinner that night. It was amazing...



Indeed the best falafel in the world...



With a nutella-banana crepe for dessert, cooked on a hotplate at a little crepe stand in Le Marais...



And then, because we couldn't afford to eat at La Closerie de Lilas, we ate another (relatively) fancy lunch across the street at another, anonymous cafe...



Escargot and toast...



French onion soup, in France!



And later that night, took a trip over to my friend Francesca's apartment, where I used my newfound Spanish culinary skills to cook a Spanish tortilla de patata, a feat that I have since tried and failed about 4 times. Apparently it requires a non-stick pan...



And finally, after our last-night stroll on the Isl Saint-Louis, we went for some more coppery-tasting marennes (see the "Bordeaux" entry) at the Cafe Saint-Louis...



Accompanied by a bottle of Puilly, we made short work of them...



That's all for now. Perhaps some Pittsburgh pictures will be uploaded before I go, perhaps not.

Thanks to all who have been reading the blog, and I will alert you when Whelan has more Travels to write and photograph.

Cheers!
Robbie