Go blue. Find, where they hide

Dear reader, I've previously expressed my dissatisfaction with the public restrooms (restrooms, mind you, not toilets) here. Despite the fact that I come form a society, where "forest break" was used as synonym for "public toilet", I would like to think that some time has passed since then and nowadays it would be possible to take care of this kind of needs in a bit more privately than ducking behind a tree. But not in this country. And here also pictures to show, how the toilet doors covers you just as much as the stall doors in my high school 25 years ago. And since we are talking about sanitary rooms here, in addition to the fact that everyone can look (look, not peek) into the stall and that the automatic flushing system manages to flush 5 times while I'm in the stall, also the toilet paper rolls are almost on the floor. To grab the paper, you don't only need to squat, but also bend down while squatting.

Since the most convenient and cheap option to shop here is Amazon (easy return, shipping within two days, sometimes even next day), we have packages on our doorstep every day or every other day. Sometimes several a day. The mail(wo)men bring the packages to the door, leave on the doorstep and drive on to the next house. Now they have started to take pictures of the package they did throw on the doormat and I can see under my Amazon orders those lonely waiting packages. Noticed from our bedroom window the other day that the mail-lady was coming. However, she didn't go like usually to the main door, but walked to garage door and left the packages on the side of garage. I would have found those several days later.

Scott woke up with some kind of stomach ache and being a loving wife, I made him a cup of chamomile tea. Since he doesn't like hot beverages, I told him to drink it later, when it's on room temperature. An hour later he poured it down the sink, because it apparently smells and tastes gross. I should tell him, how the fingers of the little eastern-European back in the days the chamomile flowers picked, so that in case of some pain or infection there would be tea to drink. I'm sure, he's trying to figure out, how he ended up with this treehugger, who tries to poison him with the rowans and offers him some herb tea, when he's already feeling lousy. I'm sure, he wouldn't touch the pine sprouts either.

Can't keep calm, we're going to Las Vegas. Returning.

Being foresighted tourists, after the lousy brunch on Thursday we had walked by all possible breakfast and brunch places in Old Vegas and checked out the menus. And chose Terrace in Downtown. To make our Saturday morning slightly more interesting, instead of walking there straight for 20 minutes, we took the 45-minute walk and arrived merely 2 minutes after they opened the doors. I took hash browns with poached eggs, asparagus and sauce hollandaise. Scott chose waffles with fried chicken, whipped cream, strawberries and apples. The waitress told us later that she's from New York and not used to chicken being served with waffles. New York... I tell you that for the bigger part of Europe it's not known that chicken is eaten with waffles and whipped cream and pancakes are served with bacon and maple syrup. So, not as backwards there in New York as she thought. And that all is served in the country, where Scott could not believe his eyes, when I added pepperoni to his scrambled eggs. Because pepperoni belongs on pizza not with the eggs. Duh, one sausage all. The food was delicious, btw.

We walked through a casino, took our luggage from the hotel, bought some corn flour in our arepa joint and took Lyft to airport. Boarding and deplaning in this country will remain a mystery to me. In the bigger planes the travellers are often divided into groups and in Europe, right after the rich, beautiful and baby-boomers the groups sitting in the back of the plane can board. Lastly the first rows will be filled. In US it's the other way round. Here also, the ones with more kids and bigger wallets got to board first, but right after them the people are boarded from front rows to last rows. And then the ones, sitting in the back, are patiently (or not that patiently) waiting in the aisle, while the first rows are lifting up their luggage. After landing, in Europe, people are deplaning logically - the ones, standing up in the aisle, get to exit first. The ones, still sitting, can start moving, if there's a gap in the lane. The aisle is filled with people and everyone reaches terminal fairly fast. In US, on the other hand, people are being let out row by row. Even if all the six passengers in row 8 are all still sitting, the ones from row 9 are waiting, until those 6 have stood up, reached for their luggage and start moving out. Most of the time the aisle is just empty, because someone has trouble getting down their 55lb luggage down or is making their way through people five rows back, where they found an empty spot for bags.

Meanwhile there was a lot of snow at home.

Can't keep calm, we're going to Las Vegas. New Vegas and tacos.

What I learned from yesterday morning, is to trust myself instead of the food critics. So, rather than eating sodden vegetable arepas with pouched eggs we went to our favourite arepa joint for breakfast. And I got exactly what I needed - crunchy cachapa with amount of cheese that would feed a smaller African country for a year. So good! Coffee was also exactly what I would expect in a diner, i.e. nothing spectacular but also not a see-through drink.

We walked towards Strip and counted all the hotels, built in the last year. Well, there were few. One bigger than the other. We walked until Eiffel Tower, took the elevator up, inspected once again the construction site and mountains on the horizon and took Lyft to the taco joint. Because once again I had done my research and found out that only 4,5 walking hours away are the best tacos in Nevada. We arrived and to start with, we ordered 3 tacos and a portion of guacamole. And after finishing those, we ordered 3 more. We would have ordered more, but Spirit Airlines puts a lot of effort into balancing the weight on board correctly and we didn't want to cause any annoyance for them by making the plane gravitate to left and keep circling above Las Vegas. So, we had tacos with grilled fish, shredded beef and pork and spicy shrimps. The research paid off, everything was as good or better than expected. Apart from the fish taco, which could use some fine tuning with a dressing.

Since the taco joint was in a cute little suburb, we walked around a bit, watched kids biking around in casinos and returned to the hotel for an afternoon nap.

In the evening we went again to our favourite place - the container park, because Scott wanted to have a hot dog. We were sitting at the table, set with hot dog and cold beer, when suddenly there were loud bangs and sparks everywhere. Considering that I am in a country where it's easier to buy a gun than yogurt with no added sugar, I was already intending to hit the floor under the table, when I remembered that it's time for the praying mantis to get into action again. To calm down, the best idea seemed to go to casino and gamble some more money, but we ended up walking out there with 32 USD winning.

Since I skipped on hot dog due to not being hungry, but still felt like having something good, I googled cafes. To get a good coffee and a delicious truffle. But guess what, US is not known as country of classic cafes. Instead of a nice cozy cafe I had the option of visiting "Heart Attack Grill" just on the other side of the street. And if I'd be a 350 lb customer, I would eat there for free. They have a scale right next to the entrance with a ramp big enough to accommodate all kinds of support equipment the 350 lb customer might have to be able to move around. So, we went to Starbucks. I had shortbread coffee and a cake on a stick. They had rolled some cookie dough into balls and covered with frosting. Scott had hot chocolate and some fairly boring coffee cake.

Can't keep calm, we're going to Las Vegas. Old Vegas.

As we all know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day and of course I had done my research and chosen 4 brunch places for our 3 mornings. Today we decided to start with the closest to us. Makers & Finders. I chose poached eggs with veggies on arepas and a coffee. Although they had forgotten to add coffee to the hot water, they served it with a little jar of milk, so after adding the milk to the hot water, it wasn't transparent at least anymore. The arepas were covered with grilled veggies and topped up with poached eggs and chimichurri. Chimichurri was the only thing on the plate that added any kind of flavour to the food and they had been fairly frugal with it. We asked some more chimichurri and sauce hollandaise. It made the food somewhat better, but hardly enough.

Remembering fmor last night, how sugar saved the night, I decided that to compensate the disappointment this morning I need a Dairy Queen. We walked to the nearby shopping paradise. They called it outlet center, but had forgotten to downdate the prices according to outlet ones. I stepped into Dairy Queen with the plan to get the most chocolatey chocolate ice cream. The plan was good until I saw Reese Superblizzard on the menu. Reese is the one making those delicious peanut butter sweets. The girl, who told me that the Reese's Blizzard is totally out of this world, even turned the cup upside down to prove me what amazing ice cream she just prepared for me. And the only thing, I could think of was the Dairy Queen in Howell, where the lady warmed the cup so long in her hand that she wouldn't have even needed to turn the cup around - the ice cream would have been all over the floor halfway already. After the ice cream break we made our way to the downtown to look around on the Fremont Street and in container park. There's still space for improvement for sidewalks in this country. First, there are way less sidewalks than roads here and second, here in Las Vegas, they haven't visually marked any of the driveways, but physically you can feel them all. I stumbled on those unexpected height differences every few hundred feet. But maybe that's why they don't design and build more sidewalks, because you can't really walk on them anyway.

We made it to the Fremont Street and the city brightened up. We stopped in few casinos, looked at the old neon signs and all the lit up facades. In Fremont's five blocks every day 12,5 million LED lights are lit. We continued to the container park that's a center built of old containers full of shops, restaurants, terraces, huge playground and a stage. And it has a huge metal praying mantis in front of it that is supposed to get alive in the night, start some fires and jump up and down. We decided to return for the sunset.

By that time the time was reasonable for late lunch or early dinner and we went to our arepa joint for another try. To make it more interesting, we walked there through all the streets that were on those 3 kilometers between us and the arepas. Turned out that at 3pm the joint was open and we ordered our arepas. I managed not to get exactly what I wanted, but it was still very good. Another try tomorrow. One day it has to work out!

Short stop in the hotel and by sunset we found ourselves by the praying mantis again. We watched the show, had some beer and by 7pm went back to Fremont street, because it was time for the grandiose light show. Turned out that they called the 6-minute animation of little green men that was shown on the ceiling that was covering several hundred meters of the street, a light show.

Can't keep calm, we're going to Las Vegas. Arrival.

Last year Scott had the idea that we should go to Las Vegas for our anniversary. Around Christmastime the ticket price went down to suitable level for suitable days and we bought them. Booked the accommodation as well and already three weeks later arrived in Las Vegas. I have mentioned those delicious arepas in Las Vegas in this blog previously too and the first thing on the agenda after dropping off the bags was to go to our arepa joint and have dinner. Planned, but not executed. Although I had consulted their web page that they are open until 11pm and we have plenty of time, it turned out that they apparently had forgotten to check their site and at 9:58pm locked the door right in front of us.

Since we were hungry, we stepped into a Mexican joint basically next door, but the taco I had there, is not even worth mentioning. What Scott had, was somewhat better. I decided that the only thing to save the situation, is chocolate and grabbed a peanut butter Twix in 7/11. To get to the chocolate aisle, I had to squeeze through an army of gamblers, who with all the extended family had occupied all the machines, smoked like chimneys and raced the horses from the left side of the screen to the right side.

Go blue. Daytrip

I feel that yesterday needs a dedicated blog post. I'm usually not the we-woke-up-in-the-morning-and-had-sunny-side-up type of blogger, but I make an exception regarding yesterday. I can still remember an actual book I tried to read once. It might have been Indrek Jääts's book "Asian Diaries. From Northern India to Southern China", where already the first chapter started with description how the author woke up in his hotel room and saw the blue sky from window. Anyway, I never made it through the chronological description of day one. But coming back to yesterday, we drove to Detroit to have brunch in one of our favourite places. I decided not to risk and took again Benny's eggs with cold-smoked salmon and a cup of coffee. Scott ordered a chicken sandwich that looked like chicken burger and huge bowl of french fries with truffle oil, bacon and cheese. Those Benny's eggs were just as good as I remembered: half of English muffin (why they call that bun a muffin, beats me) covered with cold-smoked salmon, capers, poached egg and sauce hollandaise. There were two of those muffin towers on my plate and accompanied with a handful of green leafs that they called side salad. Everything was just delicious. Also Scott's french fries. I didn't take a bite of his chicken sandwich tho.

After the brunch we walked some in the city, checked out the winter market, walked at the river, looked at Canada and visited the mirror house. Inside of an abandoned bank they had built a maquette of a typical middle class home purely out of mirrors. Add the pompeous interior of the bank lobby with all the arches and the light show and the result was amazing. Since it was obvious that we won't have any of the donuts or wine on the winter market because we were still full of brunch, we made our way to Northville, where I had seen in Google that should have a cool abandoned school. We didn't manage to find that, so we continued to Howell to go to Tommy Hilfiger outlet. While driving through Howell it stroke us how cute that little town was and decided to have a walk there after the shopping was done. All those nice and tasteful Christmas decorations and everything. And then we saw the Dairy Queen. Open and all. Those readers with better memory know about our adventures with the Queen of Dairy and can understand the excitement in the car. We were ready to hit the breaks and get in right there and now, but did have to admit that we were still full from brunch. We then remembered that when we last brunched in the 10-cent Store, we also didn't need more food until the evening.

The only interesting store in the outlet center is Tommy Hilfiger and for 110 USD I scored 2 dresses, 3 sweaters, 1 button-up shirt and 3 pairs of socks. For another 110 USD Gerli got the same set of items. I had to go twice to try the things on because they have the 6 items limit... After the first round I gave the chosen stuff to Scott for safekeeping, who then gave them to the non-trustful floor employee, so I could easily get those after done with fitting. When I after the second fitting round went to collect my stuff, the mentioned employee tried to convince me that my husband gave him that ugly farmer's shirt and few more pointless item to keep for me. Oh well, had to find my stuff from the racks again.

We drove back to Howell, had Pecan Blizzard by our Queen of Dairy, walked around a bit and went to Walmart. Because the online ordered slow juicer turned out to be very-very slow and we wanted to return it. My second ever visit to Walmart. Based on Internet I've lived under the illusion that it's an extremely cheap and low-quality goods store, where only the third America goes for shopping. Like 250 pound female, who has squeezed herself in XS tights and who's tiny shoulder strap top barely covers the nipples and her 6 kids with at least 5 different dads, most of them spending currently some quality time in jail. Anyway, that's where our daytrip had taken us. The clothes were priced matching the quality and fashion - one could buy for example one dollar shirts. Groceries on the other hand were way more expensive than by Aldi, but I'm glad that Walmart's clients haven't discovered Aldi yet. However, Walmart did have family size everything. 18-egg boxes, corn flakes in a cardboard box in the size of double-door fridge, milk in cow-size cans.

We made a stop by the local Bed and Breakfast here, but turned out that they had already removed most of their ugly Christmas decorations and the display was rather disappointing.