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.