Most of the day was spent going up and down to our hotel room. We went to Fremont St. to buy souvenirs for our friends and bottles of alcohol. The bottles weren't too much more expensive than they would have been at a liquor store in Kansas. Which means it was way cheaper than buying drinks at bars. But as this blog should be just as informative as entertaining, I will go into detail about how to save as much money as possible.
After we made out purchases, we decided to gamble. We heard that you can get free drinks from the bartenders if it looks like your gambling- even if you're just betting one penny at a time at the slot machines. First, we sat down at the actual bar. We heard this would be the easiest way to get the attention of a bartender because when the waitresses walk around, they tend to ignore girls. (We aren't as willing to tip apparently because we're straight)
We each ordered a drink and I awkwardly tipped him into his hand. Mistake one. There are empty glasses on the bar where tips are meant to be put. I don't think he minded really but I realized later that it isn't as normal. Soon, he put our ticket into that empty glass I talked about before. The total was around $17.50. Crap! We were piddling around with the poker machines that are flat on the bar but I guess he didn't think it was enough. BoyCrazy then walked over to a man sitting at a bar stool a couple seats away from us. He had stuffed a bunch of money in his glass so he seemed to know what he was doing. She explained that this was our first time and didn't know if were expected to pay. He said, "No! Of course not! The bartenders put those there so that they know what you ordered." We thanked him profusely and walked away (drinks in hand) to find more interesting slot machines.
We also had to ask someone how the gold cards worked. Turns out, you can win points depending on how long/how much money you gamble. The hotel asked for our IDs and phone numbers. We each received a sparkly gold card with our name on it. Then, we put those in the machines, put in our money and started playing.
I thought penny slots would be easy to figure out. Put in a penny. Pull the handle. See if you win. Wrong! The least amount of money you could put in was a dollar bill and all of the machines had buttons to choose how many pennies you wanted to bet on each spin. I think we actually pulled a side handle once each and that was only because it was a bonus round. It felt like a gyp though because they all still had the handles, but they were immobile.
But let me back track a little. Most machines had two rows of buttons. The first row decided how many "lines" were available to you. Each line was a penny. Each button usually went up by fives. The numbers lit up on the sides to show you how many "lines" you had selected. For example, one line was a terrible idea. If the three across the middle weren't the same or didn't have a "wild" then you didn't get anything. Some machines even had criss-crossing lines which meant you could bet on 30 lines at a time. That increased your odds of winning but also decreased your money quicker. The second row of buttons determined how many pennies you bet per line. So if you picked 30 lines and then 3 pennies per line, you would spend $00.90 on that bet alone. It took us a while to figure this out. Especially because some penny slots have a minimum bet of 30 cents. I hated those. It was very deceiving. They should have called it a 30 cent slot machine. But I suppose it doesn't have as nice of a ring to it.
When I began, I put a $5 bill in. And I won quite a bit at first.
After we had a couple drinks, we went to our hotel pool. It had a big fish tank in the middle of it with sharks and in the middle of that, was a tube slide.
MommaJ's friend from college arrived later that night. We got dressed up pretty early on and drank in the hotel room. MJ's brother drove us to pick her up at the airport and by midnight, the five of us were on the strip searching for a good club. The best way to get into clubs is for a promoter to approach you. Cover charges can be $20-40 at some places and even as much as $60 for guys. We hoped to run into a promoter but mostly just jumped from free club to free club for a while. We also stopped at a piano bar which in my opinion was pathetic. Since my first experience of that kind of entertainment was Howl at the Moon, I had much higher expectations. After the third Canadian interrupted some American song to play the national Canada song, we decided to leave. Nothing against Canada, I just wanted to listen to a full song for a change.
Eventually a promoter stopped us as we walked by Caesar's Palace. Now, I was pretty drunk at the point so the rest of this story is mostly what I was told by my friends. I guess the promoter was a little shady. He said we could all get free drinks and put bracelets on our wrists for the club, "King Ink". His initials were written on the inside which means he probably got some kind of commission for it. We waited in the relatively short line and the person up front asked us for (I think) $20 a piece for cover charge. It was already about 1:30 AM at this point. There was no way we were going to spend that much money on a cover charge and only be in there for an hour. So we walked away and the promoter saw us. He seemed a little peeved (especially when I started putting in my two cents because I didn't really understand the situation.) He made us a deal that the four girls could get in for free (and still drink free inside) and MommaJ's brother would pay $20. The girls decided that seemed reasonable and we planned to give him each $5 later to pay for our own cover charge.
There isn't too much to say about this bar. I guess we weren't ever able to get any drinks because there were only two bartenders and they ignored us. Not many people were on the dance floor and later a "booty contest" took place. BoyCrazy's reaction was, "..... Do you think I should sign up??" We are so glad she didn't though because this booty contest was essentially a vagina contest. Every girl stood on a raised platform above everyone else and shook her ass until her dress was above her hips. I guess thats Vegas.
We did meet a lot of interesting people though. Everyone really comes from all over to party in Vegas. We met people from Germany who spoke a little English. MommaJ's brother is fluent in Portugeese so he had a long conversation with some Brazilians guys who couldn't really speak English. There was also a man in a wheelchair that didn't have any arms or legs. But he really liked to dance.
We had walked for a fair amount of time that night. Especially since the clubs don't close at 2 AM like they do in Kansas. All the other girls had worn high heels to the strip and were in a lot of pain. So they kept taking their shoes off to walk around on the dirty sidewalks of Vegas. And MJ's brother kept telling them to put their shoes back on. I definitely know what that's like. When you're feet are in that much pain but you've had enough alcohol to not make rational decisions, stepping on glass or picking up loads of germs sounds like a much better idea than keep those high heels on. Especially since it's not 100% certain that you will step on something bad but it was 100% that walking without shoes would feel immensely better. It's a gamble. And it was Vegas. Can you blame them?
By the time we got back to our hotel room, it was beginning to become light outside. The girls took off their high heels one final time and went to sleep.
Check back later to read about our third day. It is by far the craziest.
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