Ocean's Six, a birthday celebration and Vegas shows

When I look back on my trip, the highlight will definitely be the fact that we did it as a team. Not the 50 of us Stanford MBAs that went (though they are cool too!), but me and a small group of five of my closest friends at the business school.

We basically tried to do Vegas as cheap as possible with cheap flights ($230 return – US dollars though!) and cheap accommodation – squeezing 3 to a room in a dodgy hotel between 2 beds (awkward I know, but hey – it meant we only paid $137 each for three nights instead of much more!). Somewhat ironically, however, between our group of 6, we finished some $1000 down after all the gambling (mostly due to Poker and Craps/Nevada Dice) … which, if you do the maths, is almost half of what all of us spent …



(side note: the photo on the right is as close as I got to gambling – playing the free World Series Poker XBOX Game at the beanbags next to the MBA poker tournament. The photo on the left is my mate Dave!)

… we called ourselves “Ocean’s Six”; something confirmed by the surprise upgrade of one of our rooms from the “cheap rooms’ to the top floor of the hotel, the Penthouse (this was because one of my friends’ beds broke during the night!!!) which boasted it’s own big hot tub (which we didn’t use – now THAT would’ve been awkward). The new room, however, led to our great conversation starter: “So, this morning I got up from the Penthouse at the ‘Palace …”



It was a great bonding experience. On the second night, one of my mates, Micah, turned 25, so we took him out to (yet another) Vegas buffet (hmmm … unlimited food) and then to a magic show, Lance Burton, who is claimed to be “the next David Copperfield”. Granted, he was pretty good – his best tricks being making doves appear out of nowhere, and making things disappear seemingly magically – such as women, cars, and the $75US we paid for tickets (in only 90 minutes too! Amazing!).



On the next day, we heard the Circus de Soleil was in town – in fact, they had FOUR SHOWS running. Unfortunately, 1 of them was on break, 1 of them was just weird (“Zumanity” – not like their normal circus shows, but a whole lot of acrobats not wearing much doing some weird dances to music), and the others were sold out. We really wanted to see “O”, their first major production – but tickets were very, very expensive and everything was sold out weeks in advance.

We heard that you could wait for cancellations – so, at 3pm, 4.5 hours before the show was to start, we waited 2nd in queue for cancellations, hoping that SOMEONE would pull out, eventually …



… and they did … THREE AND A HALF HOURS later. Oh dear. But the good news was, the seats were AMAZING – 12 rows back from the front, right in the middle; perfect positioning (the stage was MASSIVE so it was good to be a little bit back, but still able to see all the expressions on the performer’s faces). The better news was that, this production was AMAZING – unlike anything I have EVER seen. Sure, the scrobatics were good (with the usual (yawn!) death-defying acrobatic feats in perfect choreography etc) but the quality of the overall production – from an astonishing amphibious stage which kept morphing from 0 to 50 metres deep, some 60 amazing performers, astonishing costumes and sets and great ideas – it was the best production, of anything, I have ever seen. Go O! (not to be confused with Goo!)