World Series of Beer Pong 5

I got to Las Vegas early (around 10am) so my room was not ready for check in. Some little celebration called New Years Eve happened last night and I'm sure that the hotel rooms were trashed. So I dropped off my bags with the bag dude and went over to O'Shea's for a beer and some Burger King. I figured that this whole weekend would be an unhealthy fest, so I might as well get the ball rolling right away.

My favorite thing about the Aria is that they made it very earthy. The building earned a LEED award for being a Green Building. So right away they are recognized with conserving energy and improving efficiency of natural resources. But my favorite part was the water walls outside of the main entrance that created a rainforest noise that was very calming. I don't know why, but I could hang out around here for hours and watch and listen to the water. Someday when I am rich I am going to install one of these in the Zen Garden inside my house.

I had some time to kill before the rest of the Milwaukee gang arrived in town so I walked down the road to the new MGM CityCenter. This hotel/casino/entertainment/shopping mega center has been under construction for the past few years. At my job I maintain nightly rates and other aspects for use in vacation packages, so I was anxious to check out the property for myself.

So far I had only read about the CityCenter on paper, which really didn't do any justice for this humungous place. All in all there are 4 hotels, 3 residential towers, 1 casino and plenty of retail and food locations. It's located in-between the Monte Carlo and Bellagio hotels and across the street from the Planet Hollywood. The main building is Aria, which has 4,000 rooms and contains the only casino on the CityCenter property. That is where I decided to start out because it sounded like that's where all the action was. And I was right, at least I think so...