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7月27日 Bright light city gonna set my soul, Gonna set my soul on fire!It's a strange thing that when you're travelling from one famous place to another and you discover just how close they are. People in the US are forever telling me how lucky I am to live in Europe, and be so close to all those places they've always wanted to visit - London, Paris, Rome, and I'm forever replying that, living in Ireland, it takes almost as long to get to some of those places as it would to fly to New York. OK, that's a slight exaggeration I know, but they seem to be under the impression that we can simply hop in a car and drive to Rome. Well, you can, but that would certainly take a lot longer, and be a lot more difficult, than just going to Belfast International and boarding a direct flight for Newark! I met a businessman on a flight out of LA who was meeting his European supplier in New York City. He didn't think it at all remarkable that NYC was the half-way point between where he lived, in LA, and where his supplier was based, in Berlin. And so it was that I was a little amazed that a short time after leaving Palm Springs, we found ourselves on the outskirts of Las Vegas.
The drive through the desert was spectacular. Tom and I didn't feel the need to talk much, instead we lapsed into that comfortable, contemplative silence that can exist between friends, and is encouraged by the desert. At one point, I asked Tom to stop the car and we got out, just to listen. It was eerily quiet. Suddenly we could hear a car in the distance, and it was quite a distance way. It took a good few minutes of listening to it get closer before we caught a glimpse of it. The driver slowed briefly as he passed, perhaps to see if we had car trouble. I'd love to know that, if he had stopped and we'd told him we were just listening to the silence, would he have understood? The desert is mostly empty of course, but certainly not lifeless. Besides the Joshua trees and various types of cactus, we saw the sorts of creatures that I had only really believed to exist in cartoons: the coyote and roadrunner, not chasing each other, unfortunately. It's hard to believe anything could survive in this kind of environment.
You don't need any road signs to tell you that you've entered the state of Nevada - the plethora of hotel-casinos that sprout out of the dusty desert floor as soon as you cross the stateline will be all you need to know that you've entered the gamblers' Heaven (or Hell, depending on how you look at it I suppose). I had to wonder how many people would bother to stop at one of these roadside places when Vegas is only a short distance further along the road. I imagine though that there are people very desperate to gamble who will stop as soon as they can, or people eager to avoid Vegas altogether, for whatever reasons, but who still feel the urger to lose some money.
Las Vegas should not be seen, certainly for the first time, in the daylight. In the harsh desert sun, Vegas looks cheap and out of place. The rays bounce off the glass facades and metal trim of the big name casinos, so it almost hurts your eyes to try to look at these landmarks. You notice the construction, and there is a lot of construction going on in Vegas. The skyline is dotted with almost as many cranes as famous casinos. It seems as if as soon as they finish one massive entertainment complex, they tear down, blow up, or simply remodel, an older one somewhere else along the strip. Nevertheless, it was still something of a thrill to see the places I had only ever seen in the movies or on TV: Caesar's Palace, The Luxor, The Stratosphere. We had rooms at The Golden Nugget on Fremont Street. This pleased me no end. This hotel is right in the heart of the downtown area, in fact it's so downtown that some people would probably feel a little uncomfortable staying there. Fremont St. also has a sort of bad reputation - in CSI it's forever being mentioned as the sort of place where all sorts of tragedies occur. If you've ever the seen the video for U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, that's Fremont St. that they're walking down, with The Edge playing guitar. I was excited to be in the middle of it all.
The first thing I noticed about the hotel room was that it had none of the amenities that you would normally find: no fridge, mini-bar, microwave, or even coffee-maker. The reason behind this is obvious: like everything else in Sin City the idea is to get you out of the room and into the casino - they don't want you buying food or beer at the grocery store and having it in your room in front of your TV (even the TV had a bunch of stations all about Las Vegas), they want you down at the slots feeding in your nickels and dimes and dollars. If, like me, you've ever wondered why Brad Pitt is eating something in almost every scene in Ocean's 11, it's because in Vegas it's nearly as easy to eat and drink as it is to gamble. A lot of the time the two go hand-in-hand. If you're gambling, the drinks are free. If you want to eat, it's all-you-can-eat buffets. I told Tom I wanted shrimp for dinner, so we went to a buffet. I must've eaten my weight in shrimp, crab legs, and lobster tails. The restaurant was dark, so I was very surprised to come out again and realise that it was still daylight. Again, this is a Vegas trick. Usually they keep the casinos so well lit that you don't know what time it is, or how late it's getting, so you sit there all night pouring your life savings into an unforgiving machine. They keep the restaurant dark because it's uncomfortable to sit there - as much as I was enjoying my King Crab, after a while I wanted out again.
Fremont Street has been covered-over now for the Fremont Street Experience. They have a massive electronic screen running along one section of the street, creating a huge, colourful, buzzing ceiling, and every so often (perhaps it's every hour, on the hour) there's a sort of show played out on the canopy. It was very futuristic, like something out of Back To The Future, or Minority Report. We stood there, straining our necks, watching the show play out. At another end of the street a free concert was taking place on a soundstage that's there all the time. Like I said before, I was excited to be in the middle of it all.
Tom had managed to get us tickets for La Reve, a show at the Wynn Hotel and Casino. La Reve was created by Franco Dragone, the man responsible for some of the Cirque de Soleil shows O, Alegria, and Quidam (which was touring in Korea after I left). I had heard of Cirque de Soleil but I had no idea what to expect. The theatre in which this show takes place is magnificent. In the centre is a huge water stage, and no seat was further than 40 feat from the action. We had third row seats, which allowed us close enough to really see what was going on, but not so close that we got wet! Before the show started there were all sorts of things going on to keep the audience occupied - four guys, a bit like mimes or minstrels, were going around the theatre to all the bald men, putting swim caps on their heads! Then they'd make them stand up, and they'd get an ovation from the rest of us who were feeling very fortunate to have hair. One guy in particular kept taking his swim cap off, and every so often, the four minstrels would appear at his side and demand he replace it. He took it in good humour, but I think he was voluntarily bald - perhaps someone who had actually lost their hair might not have been so forgiving of all the attention.
It's hard to explain what La Reve is all about. I didn't want to ask Tom, but he did say that "it's a dream, a fantasy, a nightmare, whatever you want", and that just about sums it up. It's like a cross between a watershow, and a circus, and some fearsome acrobatics, and something from an early Pink Floyd album. I was entranced. I found a video online, but it's only two minutes long and hardly does justice to the amazing feats of physical skill that were displayed. If you have the chance to catch something by Cirque de Soleil, I highly recommend it. Just go in with an open mind.
By the time the show was over, night (the real night, not the artificial one they use in the restaurants!) had fallen over the Strip, and I wanted to see it all. I had imagined that it would be very easy to spend a lot of money in Vegas, and it is. But there's plenty to do that's free too. Nearly all the big casinos have some sort of show for free, every hour on the hour. I already mentioned The Freemont Street Experience, there's also the light and water show at The Bellagio, made famous in the closing scenes of Ocean's 11; Treasure Island hosts some sort of song and dance affair at their huge outdoor ships, The Mirage allows its volcano to erupt, and there's more.
In Vegas you can walk from Paris to New York to Venice to Egypt all in a matter of minutes. The detail in each of these huge casinos is simply astounding. Walking through The Venetian was so relaxing that, with a few more drinks and if I had allowed my mind to wander (a lot), I might have imagined I was back in Venice. The ceiling changes with the time of day, so that you can enjoy an afternoon coffee on a sunny day, or an after-dinner cocktail on a warm evening, with the stars lighting up one-by-one. It's impressive.
Back on the Strip though things are little more hectic. There are lots of people, many of them large and breathless. Vegas seems to attract all manner of people - young honeymooners (personally, I couldn't think of anything worse than spending the first few days of my married life here), middle-aged couples with their kids (I'm sure there's plenty for the kids to do while the folks throw away their college tuition, but what American mother would let her child out alone in Vegas?), old age pensioners taking coach tours from places like Idaho and North Dakota, pissing away their pension and having the time of their lives. My mother has always wanted to take my father here, but I wonder what she would do while he sat at the slots all day. She'd probably see every show in town. I think even Vegas would test the patience of my father. The sidewalk is littered with cards advertising the various services offered by women of negotiable affections, and every few blocks there are guys hanging around handing these cards out to young men (and sometimes women). Tom and I were prime subjects for these pimps, and our hands were filled with smutty cards showing pictures of impossibly beautiful women, none of whom I reckon would actually turn up at your hotel were you to call the number given.
The Irish are everywhere, and of course there are Irish-themed casinos. I'd seen one before - in Reno when I'd visited my friend Eamonn a few years ago. Fitzgerald's Casino employs a chap to dress-up as a leprechaun and greet people as they enter; back then, they'd hired a Filipino, who couldn't have looked less like an Irish leprechaun if he had tried. Tom and I popped into the Irish casino on the Strip, where the beer was $1 and the Coke was $4. I know that this pricing strategy sounds very Irish to people who have never been to Ireland, but I just thought it was ridiculous. I took a walk around the place, and it was mostly filled with men drinking their faces off, and leering over the cocktail waitresses. A number of guys were playing beer-pong, a drinking game that, if I were to play, would surely prevent me from getting a drink. I've never really understood drinking games, I'd much rather just have a drink.
About twenty minutes was all that we could handle inside, so we escaped back to the relative calm of the Strip. It was a Sunday night, and things were quiet, for Vegas. It was still louder and busier than Belfast or Dublin on a Friday or Saturday. We went home to bed.
Monday saw us up relatively early considering the day we had had before. Lunch involved a buffet at The Luxor, the massive hotel-casino built inside a pyramid. The food was great - their desserts were so small that you didn't feel guilty getting one of each to try. I spotted three young Asians at another table and told Tom they had to be Korean. I knew, because they all had their feet up on the seats, and were having trouble with the knives and forks. Naturally, Tom insisted we talk to them, and they expressed that curious amazement that Koreans display when a foreigner like me talks to them in their language. It turns out they were studying up in Seattle. Quite what they were doing in Vegas they didn't say, but from the looks of things it had more to do with creme brulee than gambling.
We somehow got lost trying to get from The Luxor to another casino. There's a monorail which we rode, but then we ended up walking in a certain direction that took us back to The Luxor. This isn't surprising: once they get you in, they don't want to let you go! We visited one of those gift stores that are filled with tat, the sort of stuff I love. Amazingly, I didn't buy anything too trashy - perhaps I'm finally beginning to feel my mother's pain when she opens the boxes I send home and discovers even more coffee cups from places like Saigon and Las Vegas; perhaps I was just embarrassed to buy anything in front of Tom.
Having done everything we wanted to do in Vegas, we hit the road back to Palm Springs. As spur of the minute trips go, it was one of the best. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Vegas, and I'd happily go back, but just for a while, not for a week, and certainly not for a honeymoon. 7月14日 Empire State laid lowMiami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)
Seen the lights go out Broadway Billy Joel A message from The ManStill and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone. Kurt Vonnegut 7月6日 Breaking the fast with Native Americans, Knights of Columbus, and US MarinesThe next morning, Tom told me that we were having breakfast on a nearby Native American reservation. Having trekked through Northern Vietnam with the Black H'mong, and eaten my lunch out of a banana leaf in equatorial Sumatra, I had pictured all sorts of campfires, tee-pees, and feathers. More the fool me. Native American reservations are exempt from certain laws, so in a state like California it means they operate one major money-spinner of a business: casinos! The casino near Tom's house had a breakfast buffet where for very little money you can eat a whole lot. My appetite had definitely shrunk in Asia, so I'm not sure I got my money's worth. Not so with everyone else - they all ate more in one sitting than I would normally have for breakfast in a week. Most people left the building still munching on something: an apple say, or an ice-cream.
On the way home we stopped off at the grocery store and I was again struck by the sheer size and variety of foodstuffs sold in American supermarkets. Bill Bryson includes a whole chapter on this subject in his book "I'm A Stranger Here Myself", and, short of actually coming to the US and doing some shopping, it's about the best way to get a feel for the degree of choice these people have when they shop. Tom directed me toward the beer section and stocked-up on a number of microbrews from around the country, including a rather tasty Hawaiian beer called Fire Rock. I thought it was rather nice of him, especially as he no longer drinks! We also picked up some ingredients for his infamous cold fruit soup, which wasn't as bad as I'd been told to expect, and it quite hit the spot later that hot afternoon.
The rest of the day was spent lounging by the pool, which was freezing, despite being in the middle of the desert, where the temperature was in the high 90s. I abandoned the pool for the jacuzzi, feeling slightly ridiculous to be sitting in a tub of boiling water with the sun beating down on me, but it was rather relaxing. From the pool, the view up to the mountains was spectacular, and in the fall and winter you can see the snow and ski slopes from there. It seemed rather odd that in 20 minutes you could drive from the baking desert to an icy ski slope, but this is America, and very little surprises me about the place anymore.
To escape the house and the heat we decided to catch a movie at a complex across town. It was a beautiful evening and the courtyard was filled with families, shoppers, and diners, all looking rather too good and Californian for my liking - I stuck out in my Asian-beer knock-off t-shirt and pasty legs. The movie we opted to see was Ocean's 13 (there wasn't much choice: it was either that or Shrek The Third) and it's a good thing we did. It was rather enjoyable, much more so than Ocean's 12 (though not as good as Ocean's 11, of course). Afterwards, Tom asked if I had ever been to Las Vegas. I hadn't, and told him so. He asked if I'd like to go. Now, Vegas isn't somewhere I'd ever really thought about going. I don't like to gamble, I don't care for either Celine Dion nor Barry Manilow, and I couldn't really imagine what else there was to do there. However, with someone like Tom, who seems to know every city he has ever been to like the back of his hand, I thought it might be fun. I readily agreed. We decided to go the next day. (It's a good thing we didn't go to see Shrek - God knows where we would've ended up!)
The following morning found us up and on the road early, except not for Vegas, but for Mass. On a normal Sunday Tom says about five Masses, some at a regular chapel on the main base, and one out in the training field at a tin hut called the Chapel In The Desert! Knowing fine well that going to five Masses was not my idea of a good time, he instead decided to put me to work. Dropping me off a pancake breakfast being run as a fundraiser by the Knights Of Columbus, he suggested I "help out". The Knights of Columbus, or "KCs" as they're sometimes called, is a Catholic fraternal organisation that operates mostly in the US, but also in places like the Philippines, Central America, and Poland. They have a massive life insurance program, and in the year 2005 alone gave $136million directly to charity. The money from this pancake breakfast was to be used to pay for a minibus to drive a group of local children to a convention in California later in the summer. Because the town of 29 Palms is full of Marines and their families, every Knight I met was either a Marine, or a former Marine. And because I was a friend of the Father's, I was greeted like a long lost son! I didn't have to do much, except eat pancakes and pass ticket stubs to the Marine Sergeant who was taking the entrance money.
I got talking to one of the wives of a former officer who seemed genuinely concerned that I mightn't get to visit the Joshua Tree National Park while I was visiting. Finding another Knight to relieve me of my duty, we hopped in her car and raced up the road to the entrance of the park. The Park Warden was married to a Marine, and her father-in-law was Irish-American, and also a Knight. Of course we sat at the ticket window talking for 10 minutes before making it into the park! The park is very beautiful, the road rising slowly up into the hills, on both sides of the path are Joshua Trees as far as the eye can see. We stopped at a rock formation called Skull Rock to take some photos, and I was struck with how quiet the desert was. Even the other couple taking photos near us didn't seem to feel like talking. At the top of the park is an area called Vista Point that provides excellent views of the surrounding area. Even that day, and it wasn't terribly clear, I could see the town of Palm Springs, a good hour's drive away. The Joshua Tree seems to be one of those things that people either love or hate. I loved them, and took countless pictures of them stretching off into the distance. No doubt they all look the same, but something about each one caught my eye and had me snapping away. After that we had to make a quick dash back to the base for Mass.
Despite being the largest training facility for US Marines in the country, we got into the base without even a cursory inspection, simply because the car we were in was tagged as an officer's car. It didn't seem to matter that the officer in question was retired from the Corps, or that he wasn't even present, nor did it matter that there was a foreign civilian (me!) in the car too. It made me think back six years, when Paul and I had to jump through all sorts of hoops to gain access to the Naval Station in Sicily where Tom was posted - and that was in pre-9/11 peacetime! Go figure!
I was going to Mass at the camp chapel, rather than the base chapel. The camp is located further out into the desert, and it is designed to simulate the sort of conditions the Marines and Sailors will have to face when they are deployed to the Gulf. On the drive out there the already bleak landscape got even more barren with each passing second. Before Mass we stopped into the Warrior Cafe for a drink. We got talking to some of the young Marines in the line in front of us (and they were young, much younger than me I'm sure) who seemed eager to implore me to see much more of California than the desert - both were from California, but San Diego, which they insisted was the most beautiful city in the country. Looking around, I could see guys watching TV, playing pool, talking, laughing, eating, relaxing. It was a little hard to believe that I was looking at a group of young men who had either all served, or who would soon be serving, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most carried long machine guns slung over their shoulders, and all were in combat gear, which kind of brought me back to my childhood! Strangely, both TVs in the Warrior Cafe were showing Anthony Hopkins's movies: The Silence Of The Lambs, and Meet Joe Black. Either the Marine Corps brass has decided that Sir Anthony is good for morale, or they want the subject of violence and death to be ever-present in these young warriors' minds. As the only person in a 50 square-mile radius not wearing combat fatigues, I stood out like a sore thumb, and when I turned around from the counter, I saw that Tom had disappeared, and that everyone in the building was looking at me. I got out of there quick, wondering would I make it to Mass, or would I wake-up and find myself a guest at Gitmo.
Fresh from Mass, we hit the road for Sin City.
7月1日 L.A is my ladyAmerica's Midwest is affectionately called its "bread basket". If you travel through it, or even fly over it, it's not hard to see why: acre upon acre of rolling fields of wheat and corn and other brown stuff that'll soon grace the nation's tables at meal time. Conversely, California is given a rather less endearing nickname: America's "cereal box", because it's full of "fruits, nuts, and flakes". Fruits and flakes you'll find anywhere in the world, and I don't have a problem with them. But on my first night in the US, spent in LA, it seemed to me as if everyone was a nut. Having just spent 17 months among the uniform hordes in Asia, and 10 days aboard a ship full of German sailors, I wasn't quite prepared for California. Of course, it didn't help that my friend Tom took me straight from the Port of Long Beach to Hollywood Boulevard, which has every type of eejit the world can create, who all seem to flock here in search of fame, infamy, or I suppose, in rare cases, anonymity. In Scent Of A Woman, Al Pacino's character refers to New York City as "freakshow central". Well I've been to NYC, twice, but to my recollection it doesn't have anything on downtown LA in terms of the sheer diversity of weirdness.
I haven't seen Tom in three years. When I last visited him, he was chaplain to a US Coast Guard Station in Puerto Rico, and I was studying at the University of Valencia in Spain. Now, he's base chaplain at the largest US Marine Corps training facility in the country, while I've managed to graduate, move to Korea, and travel all over SE Asia. Naturally, we had a lot to talk about it. However, I found it hard to carry on a decent conversation because I was experiencing extreme culture shock. I reckon I've been through it before: perhaps when I moved to Dublin (seriously), and certainly when I moved to Spain and then Korea; but this time was different, because I was experiencing culture shock in a culture that very familiar to me already. Everything was so familiar, and yet I felt so very unsettled. I'm glad I wasn't alone, that I was in fact with someone who has also travelled a lot and therefore understands this type of thing, and I wondered how it would feel when I eventually made it back to Ireland.
Walking the streets I was surprised by all the shapes, sizes, colours, and races of people: blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian (Yes! Even the Asians surprised me, mostly because they dressed like Westerners and spoke English.) And then there were all the subgroups: the goths, the punks, the rockers, the hippies, the rappers, the tourists, the homeless, the locals, the cops, the hookers, the mimes and musicians, the impersonators - street performers dressed-up as movie characters posing for photos. I found myself following the snippets of conversations as I walked along, simply because I could. Even when I heard Spanish I'd listen, and feel a sort of surprised relief that I could follow most of what was being said; it didn't seem nearly as foreign to me as Korean, or Chinese, or Bahasa had.
When my eyes weren't popping out of my head at all the different people, they were frantically scanning the buildings - every one of which seemed to be a landmark of some sort: LA City Hall, the Capitol Records Tower, the Kodak Theatre, Sid Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I even had to watch where I put my feet, because every step landed on one of the Walk of Fame's stars, and I kept spotting the names of actors that I knew and enjoyed.
After a look at the Hollywood sign, Tom suggested we go for dinner and a drink. I wasn't terribly hungry, but I needed the drink. We rode the metro, not making eye contact with anyone, to Union Station. LA's Union Station is small in comparison with other Union Stations, but it is still very impressive. Built just before World War II, the beautiful waiting room inspired in me all sorts of notions about train travel. Across from the Station is Olvera Street, referred to as the birthplace of Los Angeles. It was near here, in 1781, that a group of 11 Spanish families founded a sub-mission that would eventually grow to be one of the largest, powerful, and best-known cities in the world (With one of the longest names too: "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula", or, "The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula").
After a margerita and Mexican dinner in what was supposedly the oldest brick cafe in LA, Tom and I made the 3 hour drive back to Palm Springs. Even late at night, and it was after 9 p.m. when we left, the roads were packed with every type of vehicle imaginable. At his apartment we had one beer before retiring gratefully to our rooms. I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow. |
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