For Christmas we got invited by Jeff's cousin Steve over to his place in Los Angeles. He's got one hell of a house at Manhattan Beach, meaning right on the beach, with a view of the ocean, a posh neighbourhood. On our Christmas, i.e. the 24th, we went to visit some Swedish family to have a look at a Swedish Christmas. Supposedly it was just round the corner, we set off around seven in the evening. Well, apparently "round the corner" is a relative term, it was about 120 km. An even more luxurious house, with a rock, two waterfalls, a cave and an artificial lake (the word pool is way too small for that :)) You could swim into that cave and climb out through a tunnel at the top of the rock.
There were about 40-50 people there, they were having all sorts of fun and booze, and then there was grub. There was loads of food on two maxi-tables, everyone was called together, we formed a circle, held hands and then some singing happened. Probably a prayer or something, us heathens just flapped our jaws silently. Káča might have been making some melodic noises, I think :))
When the singing was over, everybody threw themselves at those heaps of food and piled it onto their plates. Which means it was a buffet. And it also means I looked like a total nutter there, drooling over it before the prayer :)))
When everybody was stuffed, Grandfather Frost arrived. Actually, what am I babbling on about, I almost forgot that I have to hide my communist upbringing, because communism has a worse meaning here, I think, than fascism or cannibal :)) So Santa Klaus Václav arrived and they shoved about four potato sacks full of presents on him. Every kid whose name was called had to walk across that whole room the size of a volleyball court, sit on the old man's lap and say thank you. Thank God we didn't get anything.
When everything had been handed out, the kids vanished, the lights went off and after a while, to the sound of some legend, the kids came back wearing white robes with burning candles in a ring on their heads. They were handing out some sweets. Some Swedish custom, I guess, or whatever.
Then we drove back to the cousin's. They're terrible, but I mean terrible boozers, I already met them once in Italy. They've even got a bar in that house. Not one of those little cabinets in the living room, but a proper regular bar with a wooden bar counter about 3 m long, bar stools, hundreds of glasses up by the ceiling, shakers and dozens of spirits for long drinks, table football!!! (the kind where there are little men on rods and a ball flying between them :)), armchairs and sofas, a telly etc., just a regular bar. So of course we boozed there till morning, and when I say till morning, I mean till eight in the morning. Then the kids got up, so Steve took his daughter to some amusement centre to play some arcade games with her and the rest of us went to bed. At first I was drinking Martinis at those Swedes' place (which in the American version isn't that sweet lip-gluer like back home, it's about 200 ml of vodka, ice, an olive and a teaspoon of Martini!) and then in the \"bar\" I switched to Cosmopolitans, which is again vodka, some weird booze the colour of Scotch and cranberry juice. I'd never seen cranberry juice before in my life, but since I've been here, I keep drinking it with vodka. Because the local beer is total... And you can imagine how I felt in the morning, right?
It was terribly hot outside, so we went for a walk on the beach, thinking we'd have a swim. A few people were swimming there (absurd on Christmas Eve and St Stephen's Day, isn't it?), except I felt so awful that we gave up on it.
In the evening about 30 people gathered again and there was another massive dinner. This time I took part in its \"cooking\", in fact I can say almost 50 percent of it. We got in the car and drove to pick up two pre-ordered turkeys and a thousand other ingredients prepared ready to be scoffed :)) That's how they cook here at Christmas. Well, at the places of those who can afford it, I guess.
Oh, and the presents, those were unwrapped right after lunch. Well, after lunch, that's nonsense, because apart from me and Káča everybody here eats only once a day, which is killing me. So the presents were unwrapped after noon. The biggest fuss was caused by Jeff, who bought his new mistress, 17 years younger than him, about 11 complete outfits. Complete means from shoes, trousers or a skirt, a blouse, all the way to a coat and jewellery, always everything together so it matches. I got a solid leather jacket (no wonder I liked it, since I picked it out myself :)) I wanted to prevent receiving a garish red jacket with rugby lettering like I got last time :)) This time I also managed to buy Jeff a present of the same value, so all good.
And after dinner of course there was terrible boozing again in the bar till morning.
Besides experiencing a pretty interesting Christmas, we also received another interesting invitation for New Year's Eve. Steve's wife Laura is a lawyer (so is Steve) and one of their clients, Mon Sir Parvizia Azad from Iraq, is a terrible gambler in Las Vegas. Well, and when a person loses a lot of money in Las Vegas, in time he earns the so-called gold card, which means he gets a hotel, a limo, food, drinks for free, eventually even a plane to Las Vegas and later on the same perks for his friends. I mean, when a guy loses 7,000 dollars (280,000 CZK) in one night and it happens to him several times a year, no wonder they want him back, right? So we became those friends.
We had a room at our disposal, a so-called Suite at the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, and that from Friday the 29th of December. Unfortunately, Káča is employed by slave drivers, who kindly gave her one day off for Christmas, which she has to make up for, though!! (normally she works 12 hours a day, now she has to do 13!), but they didn't give her any time off for New Year's Eve. So Jeff flew on Friday evening, we only left by car on Saturday evening. It's a good 918.4 km to Las Vegas (calculated on Yahoo directions, which gives you exact instructions on where to go), which wouldn't be so bad if it were somewhere in Europe. Except here, in this weird country, where everybody's got huge, powerful, safe cars that could easily do 200 km/h, super highways everywhere with three to six lanes, well here in this country the speed limit on the highway is a pathetic 104 km/h!!!!! :(((( (65 mph). Exceptionally in the desert 70 mph (112 km/h). And the fines and the number of cops here are so awful that almost nobody dares to go faster. Me least of all, when I haven't got my car insurance paid (it costs about $200 (8,000 CZK) a month...) So we had to trudge those 950-odd kilometres at this snail's pace. I finally understood what frustration is. Of all people, me... I had to prop the gas pedal up with a brick, the very brick I always used to put ON the gas, not under it :((( Once, at about three in the morning, I couldn't take it any more and in the middle of an empty highway in the desert, where you could see about 485 km ahead, I let it go up to 95 mph. I felt like I was robbing a bank or something :)) But my laughter stopped when I saw a sign saying \"Speed checked by aircraft\", i.e. something like \"We've got radars in planes too\", and a few minutes later I saw a helicopter above the highway :((
We got to Vegas fairly calmly at about eight in the morning. We found the hotel (no wonder, it's one of the three biggest and most luxurious in Las Vegas, it has 2,512 rooms, a casino, a pool, several pubs, loads of shops, four pools with dolphins!, a white tiger (they had two, but one of them ate the other! Seriously! It was quite a mess, because the white tiger is one of the 24 most endangered animals in the world!). We found the reception and I was concentrating so hard on looking like I belonged there (jacket, black shirt, black trousers, stony expression, dark glasses :) that I didn't even notice that behind the receptionist it wasn't wallpaper, but an aquarium about 10 metres long and two metres high full of fish, including three SHARKS about 60-80 cm long! The receptionist coolly just handed me a map! of the hotel, described the way to the lifts, I grabbed an axe, food for three days and off we went :)) We crossed a bridge over a river, went through a jungle past a waterfall, then past a pub in a palm grove and finally through the casino to the lifts. (there isn't a single made-up or exaggerated word in this sentence, that hotel's lobby has the dimensions of a small village and they really do have a jungle, waterfalls, a bridge and live palm trees in there!!!) We took the lift up to the 14th floor, our room was on the border of the northern and western wing of the hotel. You came into a reception room with a bar (roughly like at Steve's in LA), a kitchen and a toilet, a telly, several tables and sofas. Then you could go through to the first bedroom, again with a telly, which slid electrically into the headboard of the bed, a huge window with a view of downtown Las Vegas, then a bathroom the size of my kitchen in Tunka, two sinks, loads of mirrors, a tub with a whirlpool (more like a small pool), a shower cubicle the size of a normal bathroom, a toilet and so on, everything sort of in gold (I wouldn't recognise real gold anyway). On the table piles of towels of all sizes and shapes, shampoos, conditioners, shaving foams, toothbrushes and toothpastes, basically everything a person usually forgets at home.
The second bedroom was similar, only there was a bigger telly, two double beds, a slightly smaller bathroom with a toilet and an equally big window with the same view. All in all, most people don't have an apartment anywhere near as well equipped... Price per night - $750 (30,000 CZK...) Free for us, or rather on the hotel's account, and that including food and drinks, which we of course had brought to the room. So a six-course breakfast and suchlike :))) So that was a short explanation of why it's important to have good friends :)) By the way, Mon Sir Parvizia lost $7,000 the first night and the second night he won about $9,500 back. How he ended up after that I don't know. He was staying in a different hotel with his wives and four daughters.
On New Year's Eve evening we all met up in Steve's room and split up. Some went to a show at Caesars Palace (the casino across the street), some to a show at the Mirage (our hotel and casino) and me, Janice, Brion and Andrew (more of Jeff's relatives) got hold of one of those miracle cards and headed off for a luxury dinner. We had vintage wine, I had lobster and some special steak, a few starters and so on. A total of $315 (12,600 CZK). The tip, which here is 15-20% of the bill, was over 60 dollars, plus we also had to slip the host a twenty so he'd find us a free table, so even though the dinner was on the hotel's account thanks to that miracle card, we had to pay the tip out of our own pocket. Under normal circumstances we probably wouldn't have spent that much on a whole dinner and this was just the tip :))
At midnight there was one hell of a shitworks, people in the street like flies, traffic completely at a standstill, people yelling, basically May Day to a T.
Then we all boozed together in a bar in the casino, Káča and I watched the women who were walking around in absolutely summery daring outfits (well, during the day the sun was 20-25, at night still about 15-20 degrees) and then at about three we died into bed. (No wonder, when we'd spent the whole previous night on the highway...)
In the morning everybody packed up and cleared off to their plane, Káča and I enjoyed the big bathroom and bed and the porn channel a bit more, then we packed up too, visited the dolphins, the white tiger, the Venetian casino (i.e. Venice), where they've got the whole first floor of the hotel built in the style of Venice, so a fake blue sky, streets, houses, a river with water with gondolas going along it, you'd honestly believe you were in Venice. People strolling about, getting into gondolas, shopping. And all of that on the first floor of a hotel... Admittedly it's about a square kilometre, so it doesn't feel like a building to you... Just American perverts :)))
On the way out of town we also filmed the Eiffel Tower, around Caesars Palace it looks like ancient Rome again, in front of the Treasure Island casino two pirate ships shoot it out, and that at actual size and with twenty live pirates, one of those ships even properly sinks... Quite good fun. All these attractions are paid for from the money of those who come to Vegas to blow thousands. I lost 75 cents, so they probably aren't too fond of me :))
The trip back wasn't such fun any more. We weren't the only ones who decided to leave Las Vegas on the afternoon of the 1st of January, so the first hundred miles on the highway took five hours. At that moment we were saying that for that $120 it would probably have been worth flying, but no such luck! Jeff has just been telling me that they were supposed to fly out of Vegas at one on the 1st, but they only flew out at seven in the morning on the 2nd, and that only to Los Angeles, where they had another 13 hours of delay, so they spent it at Steve's house, but he was still in Las Vegas (oddly enough as planned) and then they met at the airport when Steve was flying in from Vegas and Jeff was flying out to San Francisco. It took him 36 hours, so even though he was supposed to fly out a few hours before us and the flight takes about 55 minutes, he got to San Francisco 15 hours later than us :))) When we flew to Vegas about a month ago, that was delayed too, but only about five hours and not two days :)))
Jeff recently remembered that he'd bought a video camera about three years ago and had never used it. We really did find it and there were 3.5 minutes of footage on it :)) So I got it working and took it with me to Vegas, so I've got some footage... Maybe I'll pick out some interesting moments, stuff it into the computer and send it round by mail, or something...