RKNet Blog... Thing

The Damanhurians are a lot of things. A small group of semi-private spiritualists, architects, philosophers, ecologists, and revolutionaries, for starters. In 1978 they began building a complex series of temples into a mountain in Italy. They finished this construction in the 90’s. They were constructed with the use of whatever labor they could find, and construction was done in secret so they didn’t have to deal with legal constraints. According to wikipedia, Damanhur was an ancient Egyptian city whose name translates literally to “City of Horus”.

For your edification, here’s a short video on the history of the Damanhurians. Check out the Damanhur websites and scope around for more videos. The temples are absolutely gorgeous. There’s so much more to the Damanhurians than just the temple though, they’re a fairly good sized group at this point, with ecologically conscious installations all over the world.

http://thesurrealist.co.uk/space?user=giania
My space adventure is pretty hilarious, as is my dungeon adventure!
http://thesurrealist.co.uk/dungeon?user=giania

Wednesday -

Walked all up and down the strip. The shuttle from the hotel dropped us off at the Tropicana. We milled around uncertainly, then decided to just start walking. A lot of the routes are very roundabout, but we managed to make it over to the MGM Grand without too much trouble. We milled around in there for quite a bit, and wound up making dinner reservations at Shibuya. Once that was taken care of, we wandered off in search of more adventures.
If you don't mind doing a hell of a lot of walking, the on-foot route up and down the strip is actually quite enjoyable. Minus all the timeshare presentation solicitors, of course. It's funny, I went on vacation to get away from salesmen for a while. I found myself confronted with several, and not on a strictly conversational/business level either.
From the MGM, we made our way down and breezed into the Hawaiian Marketplace that's hosted by Polo Towers. I stopped in this little Japanese-run shop called Yokohama Okadaya and bought a little purse so I could go out without my jacket. (The weather is really too warm during midday to warrant a leather jacket.) From there we walked to Aladdin, and I convinced Ian to peruse their shopping arcade with me, since I noted they had a Sephora and wanted to check it out. Didn't end up buying anything during that trek. There were a lot of really high-end designer shops, and if I were richer and thinner I surely would have gone into a couple of them.
We went past Paris Las Vegas and their reproduction Eiffel Tower. I have no idea if it's a completely to scale replica or not, but I'd assume it would be.
We popped across the street to the Bellagio, which had several more high-end designer shops that I didn't patronize, and a gallery of fine art that we really should have gone into.
We left there and got close to Caesar's Palace, but only to each grab a lemonade with tequila and midori. It was extremely refreshing, given all the walking we'd done. It doesn't look like much on the map, but to get most places, you have to go from casino to casino, and that involves circumnavigating their pit to figure out where the restaurants, shops and exits are.
After our lemonade, we decided to head back in the interest of not being late for our reservations. One of the sister casinos to the one next door to us, Barbary Coast, was past our route, and it looks a fair sight older and in poorer shape than South Coast.
We made it back early and exhausted to the MGM, and decided at right around 5:30 to see if the restaurant would take us a bit earlier than our 6pm reservation. Luckily they were happy to accomodate, and we had what is probably the best dinner of our entire lives to date.
We had our napkins laid in our laps for us, a book of sake selctions before us, and a menu that was appointed with some of the most elegant choices I think I've ever seen. We had not one but two servers, really. We ordered a carafe of Tengumai sake, warmed, although we were cautioned that most of their selection of about 150 kinds of sake was better served chilled. When the miso soup kicked in we finally overcame the shock of the decision-making process, we got an appetizer of sunomono, two kinds of seaweed and eggplant. The eggplant was a little funky, but the rest was beyond good, and I found it hard to keep from just constantly stuffing my face until the food arrived. He got a tray of vegetable maki, I got a tray of crab, avocado, and mixed greens. They both came in modest portions, but it was all so good I had a difficult time keeping a respectable pace yet again. The sake ran out at the same time the food did, which worked out nicely, since the sake paired with the food in a way that was indescribably fitting. We each had a glass of chilled plum wine, served in snifter-like wine glasses. This was perfect as it allowed the wine's aroma to really sock you right in the face when you went to sip. He got some banana-rum flambed crepes. I only had one bite and decided that I didn't care for it overly much. It wasn't bad by any means, but it wasn't what I was after at all. I got a selection of little sorbet scoops. There was peach, apricot-ginger, lychee, and a dark red berry. I adored the berry, and the lychee was almost like rose water sorbet instead. The apricot-ginger wasn't quite my speed, so I left most of it for Ian, and the peach wasn't quite as distinctly fruity as I'd hoped, but it was very good either way. Total for the whole experience with tax and tip? About 150$. Granted it took quite a chunk out of our vacation funds, but it was more than worth it. Again, were I a richer person, I'd be going back there on a regular basis.
The rest of the night was spent wandering about. We made our way over to Excalibur, whose one redeeming quality was that they had a bar right inside the door. This was a relief because it took a great deal of walking just to get inside. The arcade was shockingly devoid of Joust, or any interesting games for that matter. They had 3 DDR-knockoff machines, one of which was working (and occupied).
We left there and made our way to the Luxor. I really really like the architecture and the decor of this place. Although as a pretty hardcore RO player, I kept expecting a mob of ancient mummies to jump out and attack my face. XD The shops with all the neat egyptian junk were just starting to close at that point, so we decided to see what the story was with the shark show at Mandalay Bay.
My suggestion is not to walk to Mandalay Bay from the Luxor. We did that, not knowing there was a shuttle AND a tram between the two locations. After discovering that the Shark Reef thing is cheap, we vowed to return at a more appropriate hour and decided it was time to hop the shuttle back to the hotel. We took the tram from Mandalay to Excalibur and popped across the street to the Tropicana to wait. I misread the schedule sheet and we had a half hour to kill, so we went inside the Tropicana from a side entrance and wasted some change on the slots. That was pretty much that.

Yesterday -
In the interest of resting all our worn out body parts, we opted to pretty much just stay in. We went next door, had breakfast, got booze, came back, grabbed a movie from the front desk, and settled in. I can at this point recommend watching White Noise. I didn't know it had Michael Keaton in it. That's almost always a selling point of a film for me. :) I cannot, however, recommend Red Eye. Cillian Murphy should really be ashamed of himself for this blah, short, basically pointless film. My theory is that Wes Craven decided to try his hand at a 24-like situation. He failed.

Today -
Since we napped away a good deal of yesterday, it was about 3am when we decided it was time to go have breakfast. We went back to the same cafe we'd had breakfast at before to take advantage of their Graveyard Shift specials. That was the most food I've ever eaten for 2$ in my whole life. Awesome.
No clue what's on the agenda for today, but I suppose that sitting here isn't getting me any closer to anything awesome. I want to try to hit The Palms today, and hopefully the art gallery at The Venetian.