Celebrity sighting in Las Vegas!

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Nothing adds more unexpected excitement into a vacation than the sighting of a celebrity, and today, amidst neon lights and on our way to eat our Thanksgiving dinner, we got one: Pauly D, the spiky hair dude from “Jersey Shore,” was creating a commotion at the outdoor bar called Hennessey, on Fremont St. People gathered around the fence that separated the bar from the street, while Pauly D sat with two friends under the lights of recording cameras and surrounded by big guys whose occupation seemed to be in part to block the TV personality from the tourists’ cameras that kept on flashing from every angle anyway. Now, I don’t know much about Pauly D other than he’s on a TV show with a big haired loud mouth girl called Snooki and with the rest of a cast that creates enough trouble to get them in the news often enough… but now that I’ve Googled him prior to writing this, turns out he is a DJ and is also working on his own reality show called “Pauly’s World.” Perhaps what we saw tonight was a shoot for that show. Not sure. At any rate, it was fun snapping a picture as Chelsea assured me that it was “something to post on Facebook.”

It was a cool Thanksgiving Day in Las Vegas, both ambiance and temperature wise. If one must walk SO much and go up and down stairs SO many times, may as well do it while it isn’t too hot. My feet are killing me from all the walking but how else could we have seen Batman, Superman, Elvis (both the thin one and the fat one), Mickey Mouse, and a disturbing sight of Daisy Duck and Donald Duck, filthy and headless (the heads set down on the sidewalk) gathering their belongings, which included a half emptied bottle of vodka and another one of beer!

The city has started to dress up for Christmas. The Venetian placed an ice skating rink outdoors where people can skate for half an hour for $15. It is attractive yet odd next to the water canals where the gondolas continue to transport couples in love.

Down at the end of the strip, in old Las Vegas, Fremont is now an “Experience” with light and music shows intermittently projected on the dome over the street, sort of like a psychedelic few minutes with The Beatles songs and the sort. Not so bad actually.

We’re staying at the Stratosphere in a nice room with which I have only one gripe: access to the internet is $12 per day, per laptop… As I write I hear the screams of crazy people going up and down and round and again on the roller coaster I am told is someplace up there in the tall tower. I haven’t yet seen it with my own eyes. Perhaps something to do tomorrow…

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