Category: Travel

David wanted to go to Vegas to see if he could get into theWorld Series of Poker; i had been talking with Greg about finding some time to go out there, adn we settled on the first weekend in May. Unfortunately Greg had to bow out, but David and I were still game (sorry), so this past Thursday morning we left my house at 4:45 am to drive to Intergalactic. We both bought through Priceline, and ended up on the same outbound flight, United, with a change in Denver. Got caught up on some sleep on the first leg, and finished Mort on the second. We got into Vegas around 11am, picked up the rental car (which somehow got changed into a red Mustang!), and drove to the Strip. We decided to try Ginseng Bar BQ II for lunch, and found it quite tasty, if a bit expensive. I dropped David off at Bellagio, then drove to the Merrill Lynch office to make the deposit I forgot to make the day before. It turned out to be across the street from Texas Station, so I ducked in there for a bit to get my feet wet. Left an hour later $200 richer…not a bad start.
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Jonathan Ichikawa pointed out a nifty site that lets you generate a map showing which states and countires you have visited.

create your own visited country map

create your own visited states map

Costanza and I stopped at Starbucks on the way to the funeral, since neither of us really knew what we were in for. The first part was held in a mosque in a converted church gym (or so it looked) in Patterson. There were seperate entrances for men and women, but both led to the same big room, with a divider down the middle. There was a tape of a muzzein playing, and men seated on floor all around the perimeter. I knew no one, since Eb and all his brothers were downstairs washing the body, and Costanza, his mother, his sister and sisters-in-law were all on the other side of the divider.
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Met M?ire O’Brien at the coffee shop across the street from the Met, visited for a bit, then went joined her husband Mark and their friend Alice to hear her friend Michael Forest sing Borsa in a dress rehearsal of Rigoletto. The sets were outstanding, the costumes sumptuous, the lighting a bit dark, but the staging was atrocious. The chorus anchored themselves to their respective spots a full minute before they started singing; half of them looked as they they had never been on a stage before in their life. In Act II when the guard are leading Monterone away, the sargeant yells “make way”…to no one, since Rigoletto and Gilda have hidden themselves, and no on else is in the room. But Juan Pons sounded fabulous, and I liked the guy who sang the Duke as well, although he sounded like he was tired or fighting a cold at times.

Mark took Alice to the airport after the first act, and Michael joined us in the audience for the third act. After the show he went back to get notes, and M?ire and I had a late lunch at a Chinese place north of Lincoln Center…of course, I *had* to order a dish with a name like Mysterious Chicken, I had no choice! We chatted for a long time, then we took the crosstown bus back to the east side; she continued on home, and I gathered up my stuff at Eb’s and got his mail and headed down to Jersey.

Eb picked me up at the Metro Park station, having just gotten his brothers Hossein and Ali at the airport. Everybody else was already at the house except for Kim, Ahmad’s wife, whose flight got in a bit later. We talked and commiserated a while, then Eb’s girlfriend Costanza came and got me and I crashed at her place (since the house was packed). She got her new car (Audi A4) just a few hours before Eb got his Acura, and her quick decisionmaking I think helped spur Eb to action, since he had been shopping for months.