Spring Break - Las Vegas Leg Part (II)

So the next day I had to check out of the hotel and check into Planet Hollywood at around 1, and with all my luggage I was not intending to hike there. So I took the monorail which plies the road parallel to the strip.

The monorail reminds me of the one on Sentosa- all touristy and sightseeing-y. What makes it interesting is that as it goes along, there's a recording of funny but informative comments about Las Vegas which is looped.

Below is a video of one such comment:

the monorail track

It's interesting cos on the right of the monorail, you have the strip and all its tall buildings, but once u turn ur head to the left, its nothing but a wide expanse of land with small unglam buildings.

Elvis. Nuff said.

"Hello all!"

PLANET HOLLYWOOD RESORT AND CASINO!

To get into the Planet Hollywood hotel lobby, you have to walk through their casino and the experience is just absolutely exhilarating.
That casino I tell you is more like a dance club than a casino. Even in the day time it felt like it was a fully functioning dance club - all the changing coloured lights and deep bass club music.

I'm guessin that if I enjoyed gambling, I'd have loved that place.
But sadly, just as good food is wasted on me, a nice casino doesnt mean much to me.
I think if Uncle Edward and Jun were here, they'd have thoroughly enjoyed themselves!!!
ha.

Below is a video of the casino:



So after walking through the casino, you have to take an escalator down to the hotel lobby.
Suspended above the escalator is this GINORMOUS lighted ball that changes colour.

Talk about BLING BLING man.
Here's a video of that entrance:


The lifts are also another piece of art la.
Embedded into the ceiling of all the lifts are HUGE plasma screens.
Again, with the piped clubbing music and the visuals from the plasma scree, it feels nothing short of a mini club. I was rather impressed!

Here's a vid of the interior of the lift:

Lift Lobby of the 35th Floor.

Corridor to the rooms

Needless to say, the room itself was DAMN COOL CAN!

The music that you hear from the video is from my ipod. They even had one of those ipod dock cum speakers!

My trusty mac!

The uber huge bath room.

I don't usually take pics of myself in the mirror, but this time round I cut myself some slack . :)

Alladin lamp shaped tap which I thought was really nice.

A side table with some I-dunno-wad-movie artifact.

Because the room was on the 35th floor, and the nice lady at the counter gave me a Strip facing room, I got a GORGEOUS view.
the Bellagio.

The southern part of the strip - you can see MGM, New York New York as well as Luxor and the Mandalay.


here is another view from the room - at night !!!


Ok, so enough raving of the hotel.
Right after I put down my bags, I went to walk about. at that time I only had half a day left in Las Vegas so I was determined to see as much as I could!
And so the hike up and down the strip began once again:

I must say that although you can see more of Las Vegas in the day, it is prettier at night as you will see.

This is the bellagio in the day time.

The MASSIVE pool.

The pool in action

Here's a vid of the fountain. The funny thing is that while I was filming, I noticed a duck and got distracted by it:

The mist created after the show was over.
I loved it when the mist floated over and enveloped us in cool air.
yum.

A little video of my walk-about.

Ok, so the ironic thing was that when I was walking about, there were these 2 guys wearing 'Believe in Jesus' shirts who were carrying large loud hailers and they were basically telling people to live fulfilling lives. Hmmm. The funny thing was that opposite of them was like a whole row of guys handing out cards of pictures of naked women and call-girl numbers.

I wanted to film it down but felt bad about pointing my camera at the 2 guys, so I just took some random vid of some random thing just to get the audio: if you play the video, you can hear them in the back ground:

After my walkabout, I received a phone call from my friends saying they had arrived. So I took a bus up to Fremont strip which is downtown Las Vegas.

The person took the photo with the camera upside down. ha.

I actually thought downtown Las Vegas would be something like clarke quay - afterall, they did call it the 'Fremont Experience'. But no, it's more like Toa Payoh or erm, Jurong East. I mean, seriously, look! It's how ugly and unglam! I was just dying to go back to the glitz and glamour of the Strip. hehe.

The bus back to the strip took 1 hour to come. And yes , you read it correctly - ONE HOUR. It's supposed to take only 6 mins, but this time round someone or something screwed up and it took 1 hour.
So before it reached, we decided to walk down first. ( I know it makes no logical sense to walk down cos the bus will still pass you by, but yea, it was better than sitting around and doing nothing)

My first time seeing a blimp with advertising on it. Like a huge-ass Digital coloured screen on the blimp with messages on it. A-maz-ing.

This is a view looking south, with the Stratosphere in the distance. The stratosphere marks the beginning of the Strip which extends further south from it. So yes, as you can see it is really quite far, so we abandoned the hike and waited for the bus. heh.

By the time we reached the strip, it was already night time. We did some quick sightseeing and then proceeded to Chocolate Factory in Caesar's palace for dinner.

Treasure Island.

The nice thing about the more expensive hotels along the strip is that they have like half hourly or hourly automated performances.
Below is the one in front of the Mirage.

A little video of that performance:




The entrance to Caesar's Palace's shopping arm.

Some opulent sculpture inside the mall.

Random scultpures.

More random scultpures.

Even more random sculptures.

A bloody trojan horse in the mall.
WTH right.

An atlantis themed aquarium, a-la Wisma Atria but 10 times bigger.

So there was a pond with sculptures in them within the mall wing of Caesar's palace.
The amazing thing was that THOSE SCULPTURES COULD MOVE!



After dinner at Caesar's we headed to the Bellagio to watch the legendary fountain that I was telling you about.
You guys MUST MUST watch these videos. the fountain is AMAZING. I was telling tengkok how wonderful if they could build something like that in the middle of the Singapore river, infront of the fullerton or something. At such a scale, it would be breathtaking. Oh wells, fantasies, fantasies.

Mist appearing on the lake just before each quarter hour performance.

Fountains dancing to 'Time to say goodbye' by Sarah brightman and Andrea Bocelli:


The fountains shoot up SO FREAKING HIGH and the sound that is produced is reminiscent of live firing. ha.


Fountains dancing to 'My heart will go on':


Alrighty, so right after the Bellajio, my friends decided to head across the road to my room to have a look at the view.

And that was all for Las Vegas!

The next day I was headed for a 3.5 hour flight to Chicago where I currently am!
And thats more blogging to do for another time!

Hope you guys liked the videos!
(YOU BETTER DO COS IT TOOK ME FREAKING LONG TO UPLOAD + RESIZE + TYPE OUT EVERYTHING! RAWR)