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On Saturday we started at the Wynn hotel and worked our way forward through Encore, Palazzo, The Venetian, Mirage, Bellagio and probably some others as the transition between the hotels is rather smooth. We also spent (and lost ) some $$ at some of the many casinos.
At night, we first had dinner at Sensi in the Bellagio and went to the O Show by Cirque Du Soleil afterwards.

After the show, we headed to Tao. A nightclub in Chinese style, very cool interior design, but after 1.5 hours of waiting in line, the music was not my style at all at that night. Too bad…

On Sunday, we had a spa session (sauna, steem bath, massage, tea, organic gummi bears) in our hotel which was very relaxing. The afternoon was used to have a look at some more hotels. (MGM, New York, …)

Conclusion: Very cool city, a lot of crazy stuff, but unbelievable expensive…

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One thing which impressed me, was the flight. We flew with Virgin America, an airline which was founded last year in August. The roundtrip for two persons was only 200 Dollars, which is really cheap….especially if you convert it into Euros. I once flew with Ryanair, so that I did not expect too much from the airplane and provided services. But I was really wrong.
The airplane was a brand-new Airbus 320 and the interior was very special. When entering the airplane, I thought “holy cow…porn style?” (btw…I learned the term “holy cow” from Judith’s guest mother…awesome expression to prevent saying “shooot” ). You don’t believe me? Well, have a look at the pictures. Additionally they had music playing during the boarding procedure. After a while I found it really relaxing.
Also the equipment was awesome. Every of the black leather seats had his own LCD touch screen and a (wired) remote control. You could choose between different kind of music, music videos, tv channels (sattelite connection), premium tv (pay-per-view), movies (pay-per-view), games, shopping, food and other stuff. Especially the points shopping and food are interesting. They basically provide an online shop access; you can put stuff into your shopping cart and finally checkout by putting your credit card into the lower part of the LCD screen or into the remote control. The purchased stuff (like something to eat) was then brought to your seat by the personnel some moments later. Same way you could easily pay for the pay-per-view offers (movies, premium tv) => Awesome
And btw…the entertainment system is running on linux.

Also great was the safety video which is shown before the take-off. Instead of having the same old boring style of security advices, Virgin America shows a well-done cartoon which some funny comments and pictures. Especially the old nun at the end putting away notebook, ipod and other technical devices is hilarious.

This weekend Christian and I, together with two friends of ours: Kate and Tim, spend three exiting days in Mammoth, which lays on the east side of Yosemite National Park. The exitement already started with an 8h-drive on Thursday night over 5 mountain passes, but luckily Kate is very experienced in driving in the snow. She lived in Mammoth for 3 years and we all stayed at her friend’s appartment.

After all four of us had to work remotely on Friday, we finally hit the run on Saturday morning.  We had unexpected sunny weather as you can see on the pictures. The forcasted storm hit Mammoth one day later, which made our Sunday on the mountain very windy and cold with steady snowfall. I don’t know if I have ever seen so much snow coming down in my life. The runs were full of pouder and Christian and I learned on skis and snowboard how you can best go (and fall ) on powder snow. As they were closing the lifts at 1:30pm, we wanted to leave anyway to quickly shower an hit the road for our way back to the Bay Area / San Fransisco. When we wanted to leave they also closed all roads and passes going North because of the storm. But after an “emergency session”, we decided to drive South and take on an extra long drive of about 10 hours to be back for work on Monday. With a driving hang over we all started work…BUT it was very much worth it. We had the full experience of sun and snow and I’m already excited to hit the runs again at Lake Tahoe next weekend…stayed tuned to read about Christians first experiences on a snowboard

 

2008-01-24..27 – Skiing in Mammoth Album

]]> http://blog.thebartels.de/2008/01/30/skiing-and-snowboarding-in-mammoth/feed/ 0 judithfehse http://blog.thebartels.de/2007/07/12/beijing-day-3/ http://blog.thebartels.de/2007/07/12/beijing-day-3/#comments Thu, 12 Jul 2007 05:38:20 +0000 CB http://blog.thebartels.de/2007/07/12/beijing-day-3/ ]]> Day 3 in Beijing took us to two contrasting locations: The Summer Palace and the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park.

Whereas the Summer Palace was already totally crowded in the early morning (9.30am), the Ethnic Culture Park was almost empty. Unfortunately the Ethnic Culture Park, although it is already opened, is not yet finished. Therefore many houses and attractions are still under construction or still closed. Nevertheless it looks already promising. The park shall be finished until the beginning of the olympic games in Beijing in summer 2008. Disappointing was the entrance fee as the park is still under construction: 90 RMB (~9 Euro) for adults and 65 RMB (~6,50 Euro) for students and seniors (Well, as we looked at students, we only had to pay for students )

2007-07-11 – Beijing Day 3

When we got up the hills to the Wall, we were kindly welcomed by some mongolian farmers who wanted to sell picture books, post cards, t-shirts… they not only told us that we just climbed the 1st tower of 32 towers but were following us like shadows wanting to be our guide, t-shirt seller and so on. However, when we reached the 10th tower we started to like these farmers for carrying ice water up and down all the stairs of the Great Wall. After bargaining over the water and finally buying it for 50 cents, we enjoyed the amazing views and rested from the extausting hike.

But we had 22 towers, thousands of stairs up and down and tons of annoying mongolian farmers ahead of us However the absolutely great views made up for it as seen on the pictures. And after 3.5 hours, instead of 4.5 as our guides told us, and sweating like crazy, we arrived exhausted and ready to eat something at Simatai village. Being as strong and cool as we are and taking the ropeway and boat in the end, we reached the village as the first of our group (about 20 people).

2007-07-10 – Beijing Day 2

In the afternoon we went further south of Beijing to the Temple of Heaven. The temple was built in 1420 and its original purpose was to praise heaven and earth. But after another temple, called Temple of Earth, was built in the north of Beijing, the Temple of Heaven was considered to only praise the heaven from then on. Well…

2007-07-09 – Beijing Day 1

This video show small skewered scorpions, which you can buy at some of the restaurants. The scorpions are still living and seemed to panic a little bit. Perhaps they already knew what will happen to them?

=> overall travel time: 5-6 hours

We ended up with this:

2.30pm: start at my apartment (we were just not ready with packing )

4:35pm: departure is delayed because of unknown delay (oh, thank you for that information! )

8:20pm: after overcoming problems in the supply chain: Yeah…noodles!!

11:50pm: show the address of our hostel in Pinying and Chinese characters to the taxi driver => he does not have a clue

=> overall travel time: 10 hours

Yesterday (Monday), we visited the forbidden city and the temple of heaven. I will upload pictures tonight as we will now (7:30am) go on a trip to the great wall.

2007-07-01..05 – Yalong Bay, Sanya, Hainan

Teppanyaki on fire: