Las Vegas Day 3

This was the day that the reunion would finally occur - two sisters and a Mom would arrive to be reunited with one other sister and her husband. In the morning Don and I decided to take the Deuce (the Las Vegas bus) around its loop and just check out what the place was all about. We saw a lot of cool stuff. This was the kind of stuff I had expected to see in Las Vegas. (You know lots of plastic and gaudiness.)

But we also saw the new City Center. The architecture is cutting edge. - It is supposed to open in December. The Towers for example lean away from each other in order to get light. Quite a few artists and architects have been involved in designing this new area of the Strip.

Of course we passed some old favorites, like Paris, Las Vegas with its 50% scale model of the Eifel Tower.

Farther north on the strip you can find The Stratosphere hotel. This is definitely a ritzier section of town.

We took the bus all the way to the old downtown. The buildings were older (but not too old - nothing is more than about 50 years old unless you go to the Mormon fort. The downtown area has this covered shopping area.

This is more what I expected of Las Vegas. Palms, spaces, and signs. I can imagine Frank Sinatra riding through here in a convertible with a woman with one of those scarves tied around her head!

Of course it was a downtown like many in the U.S. With mostly the same cast of characters. I'm sure I dated that middle guy 30 years ago.

The town contains many of the usual sights, cabs, crosswalks and dogs.

But not too many U.S. towns look like this.

And this sign is to be found nowhere else in the USA.

This is a well-known image of the city even if it isn't Vegas Vic!

I thought this was Vegas Vicky, but I was wrong. It's just another neon Vegas sign. I think they put these signs up to intentionally confuse the tourists!

After a quick look around we started back on the Deuce headed for our hotel and off to meet with the family who had just arrived at the ariport.

I like this view of the Stratosphere area and the palm trees - unfortunately it was very hot in the bus on the way back and in order to get this shot we had to sit in the unprotected (unscreened) section of the bus, so the sun really beat down on us.

We met the family at the Excalibur hotel and went to the Sherwood Forest Cafe for a late lunch.

Before we knew it, it was time for us to go to our first show. Each of us chose a show and I chose Cirque de Soleil's Mystere for our first evening.

Mystere was everything I had hoped it would be. We had great seats and as usual there was a pre-game show. The first character was a ventriloquist with badly moving lips who told us to turn off our cell phones and not to take any pictures. These images again are from other people's websites on line. (Many are large and beautiful pictures, so be sure to click on them in order to see the entire image.)

A really nasty clown criticized our ventriloquist and did some of the typical Cirque clown routines of leading people all over the theater to the wrong seats and spilling other people's popcorn. He roundly criticized the ventriloquist and chased him off-stage, showing up a bit later with his doll.

I truly liked this clown. Most of the Cirque clowns I find to be a bit annoying, but this one was pretentious but still charming and likable somehow.

Of course the best character of the show was the firebird. I think this character started off as a woman and is in some early posters, but beacause the show first started in 1993 and has been running for years, there have been many changes in the program - so there are many images on the web that did not pertain to the show that we saw.

This is the man we saw doing the Firebird and he was brilliant.

The following image is a good characterization of his cockiness and manner.

Here are a few images in no particular order of things we saw during the performance. (I couldn't really derive a particular story from the spectacle, except as it relates to the mystery of life and the things people seek.)

It is amazing what an acrobat can do in (and with) a cube!

It was genuinely a phenomenal show.

None of us were really too crazy about these guys' costumes, but they were excellent acrobats.

There was an aerial act with 6 members and the four women wore these costumes that were covered in long hanging beads. The hung upside down and swang and it was mesmerizing to watch the beads floating through space. The acrobats flew through the air and swang to meet or avoid each other.

Another interesting routine involved poles. (No pole dancing, but pole acrobatics.) The masks here are on the backs of people's heads. These people climbed poles and held themselves in vertical and horizontal positions of all kinds. It was eerie to have the faces facing backwards.

We didn't see this image, but it is a pretty one of the Firebird.

One section of the performance involved Taiko drumming. A huge drum descended from the ceiling while others were rolled onto stage on the ground level.

Everything was done with great precision and panache.

This seems to be an old publicity shot, but many of the people are still in the cast.

I'm not sure how to describe these people - they were dancers, I guess, in very strange plant-like costumes. (Click to see the whole picture) They remind me of those Rembrandt poppies.

There was a running theme of two hungry babies. This guy was funny and annoying at the same time (and very talented).

Here are our friends with the whip appendages again. Whenever they performed well, they would tug on their appendages. It was a little bit weird.

They had artificial noses as well as flagella on their heads.

At the end, the cosmic snail born of the purifying rain comes out on the stage. (We saw her horns briefly in the beginning of the show.)

This is another character that would return periodically and dance.

This huge set involved many trapeze acrobats. It was suspended way up in the air. (Click on the image to see the whole set.)

After the performance half of us went on a tour of the strip, while Don and I decided to take in yet another Cirque show. Our family-friendly hotel had this Party Pit dancing going on.

The sunset at the hotel was beautiful that day.

We walked back to our hotel and then to New York, New York so we could see our last show of the night. Here are some images from that walk. Another casino hotel:

A cool restaurant with wood inlay motifs behind the maitre d'/hostess table.

Lights on the street:

Caesar's:

And look who was out policing the streets of Gotham:

And of course not far away: Elvis number 3!!

I have no idea what these people had been up to.

And to close things off here is a self portrait that I did back at the hotel in my new Ka T-shirt.

I'll do a separate post on the last Cirque Show Zumanity