Las Vegas – End of Days

The apocalyptic title of this entry expresses my feelings about my time in Las Vegas. The problem is, people shouldn’t live there. It’s a desert! It was 106 degrees every day we were there. You can’t live without air conditioning. You can’t go any where unless you drive a car. The city is in a constant state of drought because, well, it’s in a desert!

The town of Las Vegas was originally built at a spring, or maybe a couple of springs. There was enough water for a few people. But they have long since outgrown that meager water supply. So they’ve damned up the Colorado River and created Lake Meade. Every time I’m in Las Vegas, my colleagues always express surprise at how low the water is in Lake Meade. How could they possibly be surprised? Most of the southwestern U.S. uses the Colorado river as their water supply. And more people keep moving in, creating an ever-increasing demand on the same water supply. This isn’t rocket science. It’s not even hydrology or ecology. It’s math!

On the plus side, most of the electricity in Las Vegas comes from Hoover Damn, so at least they aren’t pumping coal emissions into the air. There’s enough smog as it is, as this picture shows.


My wife felt sick when we were on the Strip: head aches, sneezing, common allergy symptoms. She spent her days in Red Rock Canyon while I was at meetings, and felt great there. It had to be the smog. Vegas’s smog problems are simple as well: since people are obliged to drive everywhere, they, well, do. The problem is exacerbated by geography: Vegas is surrounded by mountains, so the smog never blows away. It just sits there like soup in a bowl.

There was one good discovery in Vegas itself: Bouchon, at The Venetian, a bistro owned by Chef Thomas Keller of French Laundry. We didn’t have reservations, but we decided to take a chance. We ate at the bar. The food was fabulous, and the restaurant itself was very nice. A bit kitchy, perhaps, decorated in the “Parisian Bistro” style, but not over the top. It was the best food I’ve had in all my trips to Vegas, except perhaps for a little Mexican place in a suburban strip mall, which I’ll never find again.

After two days of meetings and an early morning visit to Red Rock Canyon, we headed back home. I was sad to leave San Francisco, but thrilled to be out of Vegas and happy to once again be in DC. I always seem to forget just how much I like living here, everything about it: the people, the neighborhoods, our apartment, even the buildings themselves, and the weather. I love to travel, but I’m always glad to get back to DC.

San Francisco Day 4 - Las Vegas

Our last morning in San Francisco we ate breakfast at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. It was little pricey, but quite good. And the Fairmont is a grand old hotel, full of pretension and columns and molding and mirrors and marble, just terrific! We visited Grace Cathedral, built after the 1906 earth quake.

The church is built out of reinforced concrete. The impressions the forms left, along with the color of the concrete, make it look as if it were built of stone. We found the same thing at the San Francisco Art Institute on Russian Hill, built to look like a Franciscan monastery complete with a (concrete) campinile! It is truly amazing what they did with concrete in the early part of the 20th century, a far cry from the horrible brutal uses of concrete in Washington (such as the HUD building, L’enfant Plaza, and the Third Church of Christ Scientist on 16th Street).

We had one last espresso in North Beach (Cafe Greco) and one last stroll through China Town, and got back on BART.

A short flight back to Vegas and we ended up at the dreaded CONFERENCE HOTEL, one of those newer places on the western outskirts of Las Vegas, in Summerlin, actually. These places (Something Something Station or Somethingelse Coast, etc.) are springing up in residential areas around the valley, with huge parking lots, and are popular with locals and retirees. In fact, they were having some sort of Senior Miss Nevada contest or show that week.

But since I was one of the meeting organizers they upgraded me to a suite, and even with my cynical attitude and disgust at all things fake-glitzy-gambling related, I have to say, it was pretty damn cool! I think it was bigger than our apartment, with great views of the mountains and the Strip, about 10 miles away.



We found a Home Depot so my wife could buy some turpentine, and then bought way too much food at a supermarket (the suite had a kitchen, of course), ate some chicken and Boudin bread we had brought from San Francisco, and then enjoyed the high-roller life style! Actually, that is how we enjoyed the high roller lifestyle.

San Francisco – Day 3

The day started off overcast and chilly, a perfect day for a museum. A 15 dollar cab ride to Golden Gate Park, through sleepy Sunday morning neighborhoods, and we’re at the de Young Museum just as it opens.

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m not much impressed nor interested in modern architecture. Not because I so love old architecture, but because so much of new architecture simply doesn’t work. A building should have an entrance that you can find, it should have a form that doesn’t make you feel creeped out or brutalized, it should have windows to let in light, its interior should be laid out to function well for what it is meant for. And it shouldn’t look like a giant piece of feces. Which are essentially all the problems of the de Young.

Our docent spent quite a bit of time defending the new building, always a tip-off that maybe it ain’t so great. They torn down the old museum, a classically inspired stone structure, because it was “the most seismically unsound building in San Francisco.” After spending however much money it costs to tear down a huge building and cart it all away, they then spend 200 million dollars to build the new museum designed by the “renowned Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco.” I bet they could have spent all that money on Mel’s Concrete Contracting and Seismic Engineering Services, LLC, and made the old museum seismically sound, but how can you brag about that? The new building, for some reason, is covered in copper. Right now, the copper is (feces) brown. Eventually, it will be green, which, the docent assured us, will be better.

As we approached the de Young from the drive, we couldn’t find the entrance. It is tucked back in a triangular court yard reminiscent of a prison exercise yard, although without the symmetry or romance. There are some glass doors back in there that might have been for the cleaning staff. The entrance was not prominent, and there were no signs telling you where the entrance was or when you had actually found it. I suppose that’s part of the experience of the building, a hallmark of “renowned” architecture.

Inside, the building is confusing, and seems to use space extremely inefficiently. The lobby area is vast and empty, but, we were told, the large windows that look out on narrow triangular interior courtyards filled with vegetation (or “weeds”) helped bring the outside inside. (Personally, if I wanted to be outside, I’d go outside. I came inside to be outside of the outside, not inside the outside, and so on.)

The American art collection housed at the de Young is quite nice, and Golden Gate Park that surrounds the museum is very nice. And, actually, the cafeteria serves good food at reasonable prices and is quite pleasant. So I thoroughly enjoyed my half day there, trashing the architecture and looking at the art.


We walked back down towards our hotel through Haight Ashbury. It’s very hard for me not to sound like a crotchety old man when I say things like “why would perfectly healthy young suburban teens and twenty-somethings choose to sit around in dirty clothing begging for money on Haight Street?” Not just one of them. Scores of them, amid the head shops and touristy bars and cafes. I suppose the only plausible explanation is that I’m old and I have a job and I’m a “square.”

A trip back along the edge of the Tenderloin on Market Street, a quick visit to SOMA, and a wonderful dinner at Trattoria Contadina, another Michelin recommendation, rounded out a fun day. Contadina is at Union and Mason Streets, over the hill from our hotel, on the cable car line.

All through dinner, I watched the cable cars go by, timing them, enabling us to dash out just as one came up the hill and hop on. The ride was a bit chilly, but the views were spectacular, especially at night, and we actually used the cable car for real transportation, not just as an amusement ride. It beat the heck out of walking back up Nob Hill. The cable car got stuck at the top of a hill on a flat spot where it makes a left turn. The driver just didn’t time it right and it ran out of mojo (I think that’s what they run on), so he radioed for help. In about a minute, a pickup truck with a big plow on the front showed up and gave us a shove, and gravity did the rest.

Not a bad way to end our last night in San Francisco.

San Francisco, Day 2: Borders Surfing and Sushi

In our travels, we’ve learned that the cheapest way to find a good meal is to go to a bookstore and peruse their Michelin Red guide. Not buy it, mind you, just borrow it for a few minutes, all the while saying things like “hmmmm, should we buy this? Is this book any good? Hmmmm…”

So when we ventured out again after our nap, we went to the Borders on Union Square and found a Michelin rated Japanese place right across the street from the hotel. At that point, we had probably looked at it 10 times already, but never guessed it was any good.

I didn’t find anything in the red guide for Fisherman’s Warf, so naturally, that’s where we headed, via a circuitous route up Russian Hill and down Lombard Street, where we got to watch a you couple skate board down between the flowers to the amusement of all. We also walked up the “street” that Armistead Maupin used as a model for Barbary Lane in his Tales of the City series. It wasn’t so much a street or even lane, as a pathway up a hill through a jungle. Pretty darn cool.

My wife wanted Dungeness crab, but Fisherman’s Wharf was so crowded we couldn’t even get near the out door fish vendors. Plus, we couldn’t figure out the logistics of eating whole crabs while standing up. The wharf was about what we expected, kind of a more gritty version of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. So we walked back up the long hill to Sutter Street and went to our newly discovered Japanese place.

It was the best Japanese food I’ve ever had. They had sake that actually tasted good, unlike what you might get at Benihana or even Blue Fin. We got a sampler, served cold. I’m sure they were serving those bottles you see in the liquor store that cost like $30 for a half liter. But it’s worth buying even at that price!

The sushi and sashimi were excellent. Back at the hotel, we stopped in the pub, decorated in old English pub style with lots of bright work paneling and molding. There were a good many locals there who said it was their neighborhood hang-out. And it wasn’t a neighborhood hang-out a-la The Tune Inn, where men go to get drunk fast. It was more of a Jane Jacob’s style “third place.” We split a Guinness and headed for bed.

San Francisco, Day 2

The Hotel Beresford is situated on Sutter Street in a burgeoning district of galleries, an art school, art stores, theaters, small restaurants and bars, and other small hotels. The Beresford is an oddity in the United States. It’s a small hotel with small rooms, a tiny lobby, and a pub. The pub serves double duty as the breakfast room each morning, where they serve cereal, pastries, croissants, and fruit, all included in the price of the room. At $99.00, it’s also one of the best values smack dab in the middle of San Francisco.

Apparently, there are a good many of these kinds of hotels in San Francisco: small, comparatively affordable, including breakfast. Very few other American cities have places like this anymore. New York and Boston perhaps. But the small hotels in DC are obscenely expensive “boutique” hotels. Or they are rather seedy places, more flop houses that rent rooms by the hour than tourist hotels. I suspect this phenomenon has something to do with the decline of American cities over the past half century. As the car culture became more prevalent, and the middle class fled cities, people saw fewer and fewer reasons to stay in the city, unless they stayed at a mega-conference hotel. Better to stay at a cheap motel on the out skirts and drive into the city to visit any sites worth seeing. But San Francisco, like New York and Boston, didn’t empty out like other American cities. (For instance, between 1950 and today, DC has lost 250,000 residents, or nearly ¼ of it’s population. Pittsburgh has lost 500,000, or nearly 2/3 of it’s population. San Francisco and Boston have basically held steady, and New York has actually gotten bigger.) The small, affordable city hotels still worked in San Francisco, and so remained.

The second day, we went to Chinatown early in the morning and experienced the crowds of older Chinese women, and some men, doing their shopping. I love Chinatowns and Asian markets. Everything seems so fresh, so natural: live frogs and fish, unknown fruits and vegetables, animated conversations. Blocks and blocks of activity. We had a coffee and what turned out to be pork buns (although I thought they were butter buns, which would have been much better for dunking in coffee) in a little place on Broadway that was filled only with old Chinese people. Our waitress didn’t speak English, which partly accounts for the pork buns.

From there we went on to the Ferry Terminal Market, which was a bit of a let-down after the frenetic activity of Chinatown. The Ferry Market is a larger and Disneyfied version of Eastern Market. It was very nice, and had great views of the bay and the Oakland Bay Bridge, but everything was a bit too upscale and polished to be of any real interest.

So we headed back to Chinatown for a late lunch at another restaurant filled with only Chinese people. The place was loud and chaotic, the way it should be. The food wasn’t great, but it was good, and it was authentic. The tea was wonderful, served in plastic water glasses. After that, my wife had an acupressure foot massage while I wondered over to City Lights, which must have every work of fiction ever published. They only stock paperbacks, which is an interesting (and affordable) concept. (A side note: check out Red Onion Records and Books at 18th and T Streets, just south of Adams Morgan here in DC. It’s small, but they have great used books and records.)

After my wife’s feet were back in working order, we went to the Chinese Historical Society of America museum in what used to be the YWCA. I was amazed at how much discrimination the Chinese faced in the United States, right up through the 20th century. I felt ignorant and uneducated there, and I’m eager to learn more. After that, we headed back to the hotel for a rest, before going out for the evening.

Next: Fisherman’s Warf and sushi.

San Francisco, Day One

We arrived at SFO about 8:30 in the morning and took BART to Powell Street near Union Square. After some philosophical ponderings on BART’s choice of filth-gathering upholstery and carpeting, and amazement at how the landscape really did look like Italy, we emerged into the crowd of tourist and pan handlers around the cable car turn-around. It was over-cast (which we soon learned was really just fog), we were tired, we had a lot of luggage (which we usually don’t have, except that I had my work attire and my wife had her painting rig), and we had a 4 block climb up Powell Street to our hotel. I had planned on taking the cable car up the hill, but the line was probably an hour long. How silly.



The Hotel Beresford was small and quaint, everything that the Monte Carlo wasn’t. The room was tiny with a view of a brick wall and a square of now blue sky (hurray!) above. But it was perfect, with a fridge stocked with good beer at cheap prices.

We left the hotel just before lunch time and headed straight to the Asian Art Museum. Well worth the visit. The walk to the museum, however, was even more worth it. We took Market Street from Union Square along the edge of the “Tenderloin,” and let me tell you, I thought I knew what homeless drug users were, but I had NO IDEA. DC doesn’t have a homelessness problem compared to San Francisco. Maybe they all just congregate near the sex shops and liquor stores and cheap hotels along Market, and maybe if you pulled all of DCs homeless together in one place, there’d be just as many, but I’ve never seen anything like this, not in Europe, not in New York, not anywhere. People of all ages and races, both sexes, talking to themselves or yelling at each other, scabby and dirty and skinny, sprawled on the sidewalk or stumbling out of alleys, scores of them. There were also scores of people like us walking along as well, so I never really felt unsafe, more uncomfortable, as if I had surprised someone (or a lot of someones) in an intimate and embarrassing moment. We didn’t notice the drug-addled homeless masses anywhere else, not even in Haight-Ashbury, at least not to the same extent.



As the shock of the Tenderloin wore off, we explored China Town, Northbeach, Telegraph Hill, and Union Square.
San Francisco is a deceptively small city. We walked everywhere and I was always surprised by how short a time it took. The hills are, of course, daunting, and make things seem farther apart, and aside from some huffing and puffing and a little sweating (only on my part), we had no problem negotiating those hills.



We had terrific food at Nanking Palace on Kearney, recommended by Frommers. It was full of tourists, so we were a little skeptical at first. But we let the waitress order for us, and it was unbelievably good. We didn’t even eat dinner that night, save a glass of wine at a vinoteca close to the hotel. More to come.

Ultra-Amazing Sophisticated Fantastic Fabulous Las Vegas!

As previously reported, the wireless modem was not warmed up and it worked no where I tried it. Hence, no “live blogging” from the road as I had planned.

But I’ve got lots to say about our travels.

We arrived in Las Vegas on a Thursday evening and stayed at the Monte Carlo, one of the nicer hotels, in our opinion. The food was so-so, but the pool is nice.

Neither my wife nor I gamble. We’ve talked about this a lot, and formulated lots of reasons to not gamble.

My aversion to gambling has little to do with any system of ethics. While the idea of getting something for nothing, which is essentially the attitude one has when one places a bet on a game of chance, is counter to my philosophy of life, that’s not really why I don’t like to gamble. I don’t gamble because I don’t find it interesting.

This is the counter point to people who make the argument that the money they spend gambling is simply money spent on entertainment. They could spend it on football tickets, or admission to a museum, or at Six Flags, but they choose to spend their entertainment budget at the gaming tables or slot machines. These people enjoy it, and the drinks are free. I accept that.

I choose to spend my entertainment money differently. I’d rather have a nice meal, or go to the Louvre, or see a play. I get about as much enjoyment from gambling as I do from playing Shoots and Ladders. But to each his own.

Gambling, in itself, just isn’t that interesting. So why do people keep going to Vegas? What Las Vegas is really about, and I think the real reason that people enjoy it, is the allure of sophistication and excitement. You can get drunk in Vegas, play at being a “high roller” (at least as long as your cash holds out), see “sophisticated” shows, eat food from around the world all at the same buffet, see naked or nearly naked people, all within the strictly controlled and safe confines of a casino. It’s a fantasy world, where people can pretend they are experienced men (or women) of the world without ever having to actually engage the world.

The reality of Las Vegas is much more mundane. Las Vegas is cram packed with retirees dragging oxygen tanks and urinating on themselves so as not to leave “their” slot machines (which will soon get hot!), living out their twilight years in the twilight of the casinos surrounded by bleeps and bloops they probably can’t even hear. Las Vegas is full of mediocre food and absurd stage shows and water features that pander to the lowest common denominator. Regular people from all walks of life crowd Las Vegas Boulevard, people who have come to rub shoulders with the sophisticates they’ve seen in “Oceans Eleven” or even “Viva Las Vegas,” but end up struggling through throngs of people they see all the time at their home-town malls.

But the magic of Las Vegas is that, despite all this, people keep coming back. People still believe the fantasy.

Often, when I express this opinion of Las Vegas, people are offended. They accuse me of being a snob, but I don’t really care. I know what I like and I know what I don’t like. If people like Las Vegas, for whatever reason, good for them. They should stand up proudly and say that they, too, know what they like and what they don’t like. Why should my measly opinion bother them so much? I suspect it’s because they don’t actually know what they like or don’t like. Pity. Life’s too short to go to Vegas simply because everyone else does and you can’t make up your own mind.

We only spent the night at the Monte Carlo, and left early the next morning for San Francisco, which was, unsurprisingly, much more to our taste.

If You're Going to San Francisco

Which I am...

I'm going to Vegas and San Francisco, the first for a meeting (no, really! I mean it!) and the second just for fun.

I've heard from reliable sources (old x-military guys at work) that San Francisco is lost and there's really no point in going there. Like the 1890's, it's gone gay. Oh dear.

Las Vegas, on the other hand, I'm informed by the same sources, is worth the trip. You can see Venice, Paris, Rome, Monte Carlo, Japan, the South Pacific, and Egypt, and never be more than a few short breath-sucking steps from soggy fries and a coke!

I'll let you know my impressions. I've never tried it before, but I'm going to attempt to blog from the road. My wireless modem is all warmed up, and my fingers are ready to type.

A couple of caveats: I refuse to leave what happens in Vegas there, and I'm not wearing flowers in my hair (can you IMAGINE?!), nor am I leaving my heart anywhere at all (especially on a cable car)!

Why San Francisco and Las Vegas? Well, because Los Angeles and Las Vegas would be just too damn confusing, that's why!

Living on Sponge Cake

My wife and I just returned from a trip to south Florida. Before we went, I had decided that I didn’t like south Florida, or Florida in general. I don’t know why I made that decision. (Actually, I do know why: because there are alligators there; but that sounds rather snobbish, so I didn’t want to bring it up here.) After spending a week and half there, I’ve come to the hard thought out decision that I don’t mind southern Florida. “Don’t mind” falls somewhere in the middle of my “Place Likeability Scale” or “PLS”. My PLS goes from “utter loathing” all the way to “I wouldn’t mind dying there.” Specific parts of south Florida tend toward “pretty darn cool” (which is 2 clicks below “I wouldn’t mind dying there” on the PLS), while other parts of the state come very close to “get me out of here!” (only a notch away from “utter loathing”).

Pictures are forthcoming, although none of them show me being eaten by an alligator. Which is kind of disappointing, in a certain sense, because THAT would make a great blog entry. The logistics of such an entry are rather difficult to imagine, but my journal entry below gives a flavor of what such an entry might be like:

“Key West, Friday, March 29.

"The island is over-run with chickens. They tell me they are of the “feral” variety, which I can only assume means “soft and cuddly”, because they look so fluffy and friendly.

"One particularly jaunty fellow is approaching me now as I sip my mimosa on this quaint porch. How amazing, he’s coming right up to me. What beautifully colors! What amazing plumes! Hi little fellow! I don’t know if it’s the 4 mimosas or three Red Stripes talking, but I feel quite close to this rooster right now. I think I’ll reach out and give him a little hug.

"Well, I’ve got a hold of him, and I think he likes me, although I’ll know better tomorrow during my hang-over when I’ll actually be able to tell if his feet are tearing up the skin on my arms as I imagine they must be. The claws look sharp enough to shred paper!

"Oh, look! Now he’s pecking my head. That, I can feel a bit. He’s moving down my forehead toward my eye. Boy, now that hurts! That hurts a LOT! I should probably throw him away from me, or at least leave off writing in this damnable journal for a moment in order to grasp him more firmly with BOTH hands. I’ll soon have to stop writing anyway, since he’s moving on to my other eye, and I’ll soon be blind. But no matter, because, as they say in Key West….OWW! klahtygiroqjkhfjbtyu5oheqvjrkqjvkbtroguifejhgj….”

I’m sure an entry about being eaten by an alligator would be at least twice as exciting, and probably have a better back-story. But we’ll have to settle for a feral cock. And he was, too.

When In Rome

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks in Rome, drinking too much no-so-good Italian wine, eating way too much really good food, and not seeing enough of the sights. Washington and Rome are similar in a lot of ways: half the Romans seem to want to cheat you out of your money, and the other half want to give you free stuff.

Upon arrival at Termini station, we took a cab to our apartment We learned later that the ride should have cost 10 Euros. This guy charged us 30. I paid it, being a bit loopy from the flight, even though I knew I was being rooked. Later that night we were overcharged for pizza and bad wine. It wasn’t an auspicious start to our stay. We’d read about the con-games and pickpockets Rome is famous for, but we figured, hey, we’re from Washington, where even the garbage men expect to be bribed and getting robbed on the street is like a right of passage.

So we decided that if we couldn’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Since we spent most of our first week’s budget on the taxi and one meal, we figured we could make up the difference by robbing American tourists. For the most part, the American’s were easy to spot (or so we assumed): unstylish clothes, fanny packs worn on the front, neck safes and money belts worn outside the unstylish clothes, heads buried in guidebooks while walking: it would be easy pickings.


But all our careful planning came to naught: first, we tried the old “hand gun in the jacket pocket” trick so popular in DC; we approached a promising looking family, all fumbling digital cameras and baseball caps. I pointed my pocket at them and said “you know what time it is!” doing my best DC-thug impression. The man said “why sure!” and then proceeded to, well, give me the time. “No,” I said, “I mean, give it up!” This only elicited a few blinks and a repetition of the time. But we were not dismayed. We found other prey. However, as it turned out, most of the people wearing American T-shirts were Italians, the unstylish clothes and fanny packs belonged to Germans, and the guidebooks were in the hands of just about everyone else. Americans, amazingly enough, were virtually invisible! One couple, I think they were Canadian, did give us a 2 euro coin. I think they thought we were some sort of street performers. Our crime spree sputtered out.

Later, a café owner gave us free champagne, a tour guide gave us a free tour of the Forum, a fruit vendor in Campo di Fiori gave us way too many delicious grapes, and, in an unrelated theme, a shop owner yelled at us for putting garbage in a garbage can, babbling that she didn’t go to London and throw wine bottles everywhere (although I had my doubts). There was no arguing with that kind of logic. On the whole, things seemed to even out on the financial front. Like DC, where I’ve been overcharged by plumbers and electricians, but given a driver’s license even though I clearly failed the eye test, and while I can’t win an argument with the parking enforcement officer, the hearing official usually gives me an out on a technicality. Karma. I think the Italians call if la dolce vita. Or else la curriculum vitae. Or something like that. I’m pretty certain it involves a small bull’s horn made of coral.

When it Rome, we learned, it was best to get drunk and eat too much. Getting drunk and eating too much on a balcony helps. I think the same basic laws hold true for DC, too.

(An aside: in over ten years of living in Washington, my wife and I have never been robbed, and in two weeks in Rome, riding trains and going to all the tourist spots, we were never the victims of pickpockets; both cities suffer from overblown media crime hype. Please don't comment that you've been robbed in both DC and Rome. I don't care. I didn't say street crime doesn't exist. I'm simply saying that people love telling street crime stories, and they make great news pieces, giving the impression that you'll get robbed as soon as you step out your door. End aside.)