Monday, February 6, 2012

21st Birthday in Las Vegas

I posted this a while ago, but somehow I accidentally erased it...ohh, the wrath of technology :/


Friday after my Spanish Internship class, I left with a few of my friends to go to Vegas. Originally, we were planning on staying at Circus Circus, but the day before we left, we noticed that the Luxor was about the same price as what we paid for Circus, so we traded! I think the Luxor is one of my favorite (affordable) hotels there. Got to stay in a modern day pyramid for my birthday! :)

When we got there later that afternoon, we headed over the Benihana at the Hilton for a pre-birthday dinner. Our friend, James, is living just outside Las Vegas right now, so he decided to join us at dinner.

The notorious horrible Benihana group picture
(From left to right: Grant, McKenzie, me, James, Kristal, Dalton and Eric)

 Our chef was hilarious. He made up an eccentric love story about him and me in high school and our long lost love...and mainly what I was missing out on :)

The elevators in the Luxor go up at a diagonal angle, and there was one particularly terrifying one. After we went on the first time, we refused to go back on. We did accidentally end back up on it, and it was so bad that we decided to get off and walk rather than go for a rattling rie up and down 13 stories. Conveniently, the stairs were almost as horrific...

 At midnight, Eric (my only 21+ friend who could make it) and I went down to the Casino to find a good "first drink". We ended up wandering around because I was tired and not very interested (putting all my energy towards school tends to make me boring in the middle of the night), so I ended up settling for a margarita, took about 3 sips and went to bed!

 The next morning, Kristal gave me her leftover voucher from the casino as an "morning birthday present".  I really have zero interest in gambling, but if it was free, I don't see why not. After a few minutes at the slots, I got some magical free spin and the ticker landed on the $46,503 jackpot slot! And of course, being that I did not have my non-existant Player's card and was only betting 80 cents per turn, the ticker decided to move over one slot and give me $6 instead. :( If it only knew I would be putting all that money to a very good, educational cause!

That day, we ended up walking down the strip looking at hotels and shops while people watching and then headed to the mall at the other end of the strip at Treasure Island. My feet were killing me! Navigating through crazy people for 2.5 or 3 miles is way more of a challenge on the feet than I expected.

 That night, we went to the Rainforest Cafe to "eat with the animals". I think this place is pretty cool with all the animal noises and periodic "thunder storms", it's a cool experience. After dinner, the waiters came running through the restaurant screaming "volcano!" and brought us this ice cream/cake dessert.

There seemed to be SpongeBobs everywhere, especially at Excalibur...and I am not sure why. This is above the arcade we decided to stop by after we were done with our stop at Dick's. If we're going to drop coins into machines, I would prefer it to be games anyway :)

Everyone had originally wanted to go to Dick's Last Resort for dinner, where they are explicitly rude to you throughout your entire meal. I was able to get out of that one, because although it is entertaining to make a trip there every now and again, on your birthday (especially a 21st), it's a little outrageous.
On weekends (and probably most week nights too, they have this ^ guy jump/dance around in a red string bikini, give people disturbing lap dance and smash head into his "taco belly". Girls (above the age of 18 of course) on their birthday, get extra taco attention...NO THANK YOU!

Instead, we just stopped by the bar to get a couple minutes of harassment entertain and looked at the shop.

This was a GREAT weekend and a wonderful 21st birthday present. I'm so happy my friends were able to make it and spend the weekend with me. I had so much fun! Thanks Kuhn family and friends!


1 comment:

  1. looks like you had a blast! I wish I could ahve been there. I thought you were going for some MMA thing though? I thought that was your birthday present from the kuhns?

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