First off, the drive there is pretty but boring. I'm sure when it's the 109152365th time you've driven through the desert it becomes bleh, but when it's the first time, it's a nice view.
This picture is actually smoke from a brush fire. Evacuate the immediate area!
Secondly, the elements in Balrog's level in Street Fighter II aren't on the strip. That's all on Fremont were all the lights and the street cover are. The strip itself is in fact south of Fremont on Las Vegas boulevard with the northern end being older and newer casinos popping up as you go south.
Not the Strip! Don't be fooled.
Third, casinos are REALLY good at keeping you in them as evidenced by my lack of pictures of the Strip. We stayed at Treasure Island and didn't leave. Instead we played Pai Gow poker until 6am the next morning. The legend about pumping oxygen on the gambling floor might not be true, but something kept me awake all night. Maybe it was the rush of slowly losing fifty dollars.
Finally, Vegas looks amazing at night with all its shiny flashing lights. But come the next morning, it's just a bunch of bland gray buildings.
A couple of things about the trip. My cousins took me to an In-N-Out on the way there. The double doubles (aka burgers) were extremely tasty. They use only the freshest ingredients there. The fries were just a bunch of potatoes freshly cut and dropped in fresh oil. In-N-Out gets the two thumbs up. At a gas station on the way back, I spied an entire fridge just for Vitamin Water. It made me think of Davies and Danielle.
Disneyland was fun. We got there on possibly the slowest day ever.
No lines for the rides + plenty of space to walk around + no screeching children = Best Disney Experience Ever.
Apparently on regular days, you're lucky if you get on four rides the lines are so insane. You'll spend the day there and most of it will be wasted waiting in line under the blazing sun. Not so today. We did ALL the open rides. It was probably the most efficient and productive visit to Disneyland ever.
It's A Small World.
From snpp.com: Little Land of Duff. Dead-on parody of It's a Small World, complete with insipid repetitve song:
"Duff beer for me, Duff beer for you, I'll have a Duff, You have one too" This scene contains the most accurate Disneyland reference ever!
Bart: "I want to get off!!"
Selma: "You can't get off! We still have 5 continents to visit!"
It's really crazy like that. I didn't count but I think the Disney ride definitely had more than six areas because first you visit each continent (I believe there are some made up ones thrown in there on top of the real ones), then they mash up the continents you JUST visited, then, mercifully, you get the grand finale. It's actually the longest ride on the park clocking in at around ten minutes, but it feels more like infinity. I was sort of tempted to drink the water, but remembering how accurate the rest of the parody was, I wasn't taking any chances of going through this:
Watch the following video at your own risk!!!
Here`s a palette cleanser for those who did watch the above video.
This pose is a reference to this xkcd comic. Unfortunately, I didn`t have a chess set, nor was I willing to glue the pieces down and sneak the whole thing into the ride.
Another reason to go to LA, other than visiting my cousins, was to check out shoe stores there. LA, being the biggest city of the West Coast, has to have a boatload of sneaker stores each with a wide selection of never-before imagined kicks, right? Let's have a look see at what I discovered.
(Disclaimer: People who are into sneaker culture tend to also be into the accompanying hip-hop/hipster clothing scene - Stussy, Supereme, and all the other unknown labels. Those who know me well know that I care a billion times more about what's going on below my ankles than what happens with the rest of my style. Not to say that I'll rock exclusives with sweatpants, but I put much more thought into the shoes I'm going to buy than the clothes. That being said, please forgive the lack of shine clothing gets here. Go to Hypebest or whatever to get what you're looking for.)
So, armed with a hand-drawn map that I got off the Internets and my couldn't-care-less-about-shoes cousin as my trusty chauffeur (think Kato), I headed to the La Brea and Melrose area.
First stop was the shop triumvirate of Union, Stussy and Undefeated on La Brea blvd. just below Beverley.
It turns out that Union and Stussy focus mostly on clothing so my visits there were short. Undefeated, on the other hand, had a nice selection of sneakers. I think they were the first store in LA to make the second round of Yo!MTVRapsClydes available for sale. However, they had a policy not allowing people to take pictures inside so the above is all I have of the three stores. Seriously.
The next stop was Heavy Hitters, right near Pink's Hot Dogs (which is apparently an institution in LA much like Schwartz's in Montreal. They even had the midday lineup action going on), but we couldn't find the place so we just moved on. I didn't write the addresses of the stores on my map. Why? I don't have a clue.
Whatever, we then made our way to Sportie LA. At first it looked like we wouldn't find the place, but I caught the sign across the street and we headed in.
What a jumble that place is!!! It's fantastic! Shoes crammed up on the walls. I could have spent the day there and I almost did. You have to be careful while taking a shoe off the wall to get a closer look, you may (and I did along with two other ladies) cause a shoe avalanche. It's the store I stayed in the longest, and where I took the most pictures despite their crazy photography rules (Not too many pictures, no wide shots, individual shoes only).
The staff was really friendly and pretty knowledgeable about sneakers. They also had some sweet deadstocks there.
It turns out that walked into the "other" location of Sportie LA. The main store was actually up the street from where we were.
I stayed put and shopped for some shoes. They called the main store a couple of times for sizes and had shoes brought over when they did. I ended up picking up two pairs of Stingrays which in fact came out cheaper than in Canada if you factor in the strong Loonie and low California sales tax.
We headed west and then south on Fairfax towards Supreme, Alife and Flight Club.
Supreme and Alife were very much like Union and Stussy. I managed to pick up a pair of Dunks in Supreme though then I headed over to Flight Club LA. I`m just going to let the video do explain things.
It was like a museum in there. And no photo restrictions! Despite that, I didn`t take too many pictures, mainly because I was too awestruck by the place. As you can see from the video, the walls were lined with sneakers, mostly Nikes. Another cool yet inconsequential thing they had was an exposed stockroom. The salesfoor and stockroom were separated by a grill instead of a wall so people could see piles of shoeboxes in the back . It was pretty impressive and a nice idea on the design front.
After all this it was time to go. By now my cousin was I think pretty bored with all this and wanted to get ready to play basketball. So we fought traffic back to the suburbs and shot some hoops. I know for certain there are sneaker places I missed. I saw a couple from the car on the way out of the city. I guess I`ll just have to hit em up the next time I`m in town.
Rest of the Flickr set here but what`s the point. I used up almost all the pictures I took on this post.
I'm kinda behind on my posting about places. Trying to catch up now and write about things while experiences are still fresh in my memory. That being said, let's continue.
Los Angeles
Went to visit my cousin in LA (actually Orange County) whom I haven't seen since I was, I don't know, 8? Anyways, we're older now and she has kids so my time there was family-oriented. It was extremely fun nonetheless. Thanks for the food and fun times Muns.
Anyways, LA is going to have a few entries just because there's so much to do there and we did so much of it.
Keith is a cool dude. He also happens to be an amazing graphic designer, talented artist, t-shirt maker extraordinaire, and generally nice guy. He also makes a pretty mean and tasty breakfast. He once made me a scrambled-egg diorama of Spiderman fighting the Sinister Six. He actually used green food colouring for Scorpion and Doctor Octopus. He's a madman.
Here's a sampling of his work:
Which is a take on the real Spiderman wedding cover:
Not much to say about the week. Lot's of walking, lot's of (early) drinking. Hotel parties and such. It's a shame we found out how great of a street Commercial Drive is on the last night there.
Nice place this Vancouver...
Floor Is Lava Pizza Party (I'm in the middle of a chew).
Hartley doing some night exercises.
We went to the Cambie. It was loud and crowded.
We like quiet places better. It's more condusive to face grabbing. Oh yeah, the music here was ridiculous. We'd ask the DJ for a pretty popular song, he'd tell us he didn't have it and propose a lesser known song by the same artist. We called him DJ B-Side.
We went to the Vancouver Aquarium (home of the hand-holding otters of Youtube fame) where we proceeded to insult all the fish. Matt was pissed off at them for being fish and ugly. He kept yelling at them to "Get a job".
We also went to the Vancouver History Museum. They had an exhibit on Hippies that really pissed Matt off. He don't like hippies. Here I am dressed up in their pot-smelling clothes.
P.S. The whole time we were in Victoria, Danielle wanted to go whale watching. The thing about that is it`s really expensive and there`s a 80% chance you`re going to see whales. So we decided against it, but I will leave you with an amazing anecdote. If you`re unlucky you`ll come away without having seen a whale. If you`re extremely lucky, you`ll actually see a whale feeding on a sea lion. However, there`s this one story about one excursion that had a sea lion jump up on the back of the boat to escape an orca. The passengers were startled and started wailing on the sea lion with their fists and punched it back into the water where it was promptly eaten up.
The Parliament Building. There's a restaurant in the basement that serves poutine. You need to exchange a piece of photo ID for a guest pass to eat there. The marina and Empress Hotel We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory for supper. The locals made fun of us for that.
Then we went to Miniature World... Where was I in 1940?
