Atlantic City

I arrived in Atlantic City at 2am on Sunday October 11th after a long day of travel that mostly involved waiting.

Here is the view from my hotel room in the morning.

Here's the tower I was staying in. It's pretty old but I have no complaints about the room. Then again, I wasn't in the room very much. Sunday morning and early afternoon was the only time during the trip that I had to explore Atlantic City while it was nice and sunny.

My hotel was on Park Place and a block in front of it, where Park Place meets the Boardwalk there was supposed to be a Monopoly monument, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Instead there was this Korean war memorial.

I went down to the beach as I'd never seen the Atlantic Ocean before. Unless you really like gambling I think this city must be more enjoyable in the summer when I know I would be swimming in the ocean every day.

The beach goes on for miles.

Between the beach and the boardwalk there are some sand dunes that I suppose are there to protect everything from flooding but they hide a view of the beach from the boardwalk and vice versa.

There's a mall that extends over the ocean called The Pier Shops at Caesars where Caesars is one of the big casinos. The casinos own a very large portion of anything located near the boardwalk. Anyways, at the far end of this mall is a water show called simply "The Show". The mall opens up on all three floors to allow people to look down on it.

It plays every hour on the hour and lasts for about 10 minutes. It consists of jets of water shooting up from this fountain where the lights change colour. It all goes to music including the jets changing height to look like waves and water falling from the ceiling.

Another casino along the boardwalk is Bally's which contains a wild west section. These buildings along the boardwalk are all fake. That is there is no way to get to the balconies above and if you enter at ground level you end up inside a huge lobby.

The lobby has these fake hills and cacti in the center of it. They like their big fake stuff in Atlantic City. The ceiling is painted and lit up to resemble a sky and another day when I passed through here it looked quite different. My roommate seemed to think that they must paint it with several layers of special paint and then just change the lighting, with the different layers each only responding to one type of light.

A block away from the boardwalk they again had fake hills but at least at this point there are some real trees and the building fronts are just painted on.

Another casino, Tropicana has this whole mall area done up to look like
you are walking outside through a street in some European village.

It's complete with giant statues. This is when we were looking for a pub or bar that wasn't completely devoid of life. It was a Wednesday night in October so it was tough.

Atlantic City also likes to go big. Behind these fake western buildings are huge towering hotels where the first couple floors are full of slot machines and table games.

Casino after casino line the boardwalk, all super huge. They all have pretty sweet views of the ocean too, if you happen to be on that side of the building.

I also got a chance to go to the White House submarine shop at one point. It was a really busy place around noon. I would have had to wait in a big line if I wanted a table. I had to take it and run back to my volunteering though. This place has had lots of famous people through it. There were photos on the wall of different people eating there including Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Grant, Ellen, and many more. They also claims to have invented the term submarine sandwich back in the 40's.

Buildings aren't the only big thing in Atlantic City. The food portions are also huge. I made the mistake of getting a whole sub and it turned out to be about a foot and a half. Carrying this thing back to the conference was like carrying a mini-light saber. It was quite good though, even if I ate it over a couple hours.

YVR Airport

Well, I am at the YVR Airport all ready to head to Atlantic City. There's just one problem. It's 1:42AM and at this point I should be on my second flight somewhere in the air between Portland and Houston.

I made it to the airport just fine. Going through the security check the guy looked at my ticket and I guess decided I had time to spare so he did a secondary search of me. What this means is that he patted me down and then went through my pack.

At the gate everything was fine until it was 10 minutes before the plane was supposed to take off and we hadn't boarded yet. The lady came on the speaker and said there was a computer glitch so they were just waiting to receiving confirmation on boarding from the crew. 20 minutes later she announced the cancellation of the flight to Seattle that was supposed to leave from the same gate 20 minutes after ours. She still wasn't sure about our flight though. At this point she was swarmed by the people from the Seattle flight who she gave hotel vouchers to and a phone number to call to rebook. For some people who had come in on another flight she helped them find an alternative out.

After this she talked to people on her radio every 20 minutes or so and always got a response of "we'll decide momentarily whether to cancel" or "just a moment..." Eventually though, at about the time our flight was supposed to have landed in Portland, she finally announced it was canceled. At this point it didn't really matter to me as I would have missed my connection anyway.

We then had to go back through customs, even filling out the form, and pick up our bags as if we were arriving from the US. Naturally our bags took a while to get there. Finally I headed over to the Air Canada counter to find a huge line-up. It was made up of the Seattle passengers as while as the canceled flights of Nanaimo, Whitehorse and Edmonton. A lady told us that if we didn't need a hotel for the night we shouldn't bother getting in line but should instead phone the Air Canada number to rebook.

I phoned the number but of course I was put on hold indefinitely. Since there was no more flights until morning I started taking transit home while still on hold. Unfortunately a short tunnel cut off my phone call. At this point I decided to try a different strategy since everyone else was phoning Air Canada. I phoned Expedia who I booked the trip through. They said it was the airlines that I had to deal with in rebooking my flights. My second and third flight were with Continental so I got their number from her and managed to get a hold of someone after being hung up on accidentally and at this point I was halfway home.

The guy at Continental was really awesome, booking me flights for the next day to get me all the way from Vancouver to Philadelphia. Unfortunately it's going to involve a long lay over in Houston and I won't get in until 12 hours after the original plan. Hopefully this plan actually goes through.

In the meantime, YVR is actually pretty great to hang out in. There is free wifi, no shortage of tables, and a Burger King that appears to be open all night.

Italy - Part 8 - Roma

So we were on our way north towards the Spanish Steps, but we hadn't eaten dinner so naturally we stopped at a pizza place.

It turned out the pizza was sold by weight and it was the best pizza I have had in a long time. It was quite simple, mine just had cheese, sausage and green olives on it but it was amazing. We ate in the place but realized after that we should have ate at the fountain nearby. There were fountains and really old buildings every couple blocks in this part of town. So many photos to take...so much darkness to wreck them. So after eating the pizza we also stopped at a gelato place but ate it on the go.

So we reached the Spanish Steps and this is the view looking up from them.
At the Spanish Steps there were many people hanging out enjoying the night and singing songs. Next we stopped at the Piazza del Popolo which was a huge open space with a fountain and obelisk in the center. Next up was the Piazza Navona which was made up of many carved fountains. I have more photos of Rome on Facebook.

The Pantheon was our next stop. This building was huge and you could walk amongst its giant pillars. I was pretty amazed by it. You couldn't easily take a photo of the whole thing, since you'd have to go back a block or two and in most directions there were buildings in the way.

Gordo by a fountain near the Pantheon.

After talking for at least an hour while looking over the ruins of the forum, Gordo and I arrived at the Colloseum. Wow, the Romans really must have believed bigger is better.

The lighting was pretty sweet. I would like to thank Greg for the awesome walking tour route. Gordo and I didn't get back to the hostel until about 2:30am, which was a short distance from the Colloseum.

So the next day Gordo and I were to meet Alex at this roundabout near the train station.

We took turns watching the bikes while one of us walked over to the train station and wandered around looking for him or trying to figure out when the next train was getting in from the direction of Florence.

This is a building near the roundabout. At about noon, I left Gordo there to seek out Internet. At the Internet place I looked up the location of Hotel Lodi and also emailed Alex to tell him that's where we'd be if we didn't meet him soon. Back at the meeting spot I watched the bikes while Gordo went to the train station. Luckily he came back with Alex who got in on the 1pm train. Without too much trouble we followed a map I'd drawn of how to get to Hotel Lodi. The guy there was really nice, getting us some ice cold water and letting us move our bikes into the courtyard behind a fence.

Here was my bed for that night. So then we had to decide what to do with the rest of the day. Alex really wanted to visit this seafood restaurant where you could get a great 8 course meal. Gordo was good with that too so we decided to walk to the newer part of the city called San Lorenzo and spend the day there rather than the super crowded touristy places.

We set out on foot. There was a lot of grafitti.

Little did we know how much walking we would do that day. We started by walking somewhat in the wrong direction because we wanted to find a place to cross the railway tracks. Unfortunately once we managed that we had to cross another set of them later and basically they were everywhere. We got a little turned around. During the day we stopped at a grocery store and bought some lunch. Alex and I split some fancy cheese as part of the lunch. We also stopped at a little department store where I bought 8 notebooks, each a different colour with a different smilie face on the front and Italian writing describing the colour in the cover. One for each of my family members.

Along the way there were many water fountains (aquaducts) and many of them were continuously running. They had a useful spout design where normally the water comes out the bottom for filling out a water bottle, but if you block this it shoots out the top for drinking.

More grafitti and walking.

More walking but now while it's getting dark we have navigated successfully to San Lorenzo. Unfortunately the fish place didn't seem to be open. There were signs for it but that was about it. Alex said they would setup in the street but there were cars parked where they usually setup. Luckily we did managed to find the gelato shop Alex had wanted to go to the whole day. It was called Nice Ice and it was delicious, but then all the gelato in Italy was. We sat in a park where there was a memorial to all the people who died in the bombings of this neighborhood in the 2nd world war. This is why the area has so many newer buildings, because the old ones were ruined. At around 9:30pm we realized the fish place was not going to be opened so we wandered over to a square where many young people were hanging out. Alex had also been there before.

We ate dinner in this pub. It turned out they had a buffet which had a good variety. After eating and drinking (Alex and I had wine) we walked back to our hostel in a very direct way. Then we spent some time on the Internet planning for the next day. Alex and Gordo were heading north out of Rome towards Switzerland and then Germany while I was leaving the continent to head back to Canada.

Here's my bike the next morning, ready for it's last trip in Italy.
I biked to the Roma Tiburtina station where I caught a train back to the airport.

Here's my last meal in Italy, bought in the food court of the airport. Watermelon! All in all, my trip to Italy was pretty freakin sweet.

It has taken me a bloody long time to write all these blog posts as I've been really busy with school and work and there is just so much to say. This is done just in time for a new trip. Tomorrow I am off to Atlantic City followed by New Orleans. Expect a blog post or two when I return.