Happy Thanksgiving

It's that time of the year again when we gather around to meet the family, have lots of food and drinks... no I am not speaking about Christmas, that's next month. This month we have: turkey day, aka Thanksgiving! This traditional American holiday is not very well known in Europe... or as for Germany celebrated at a different date. Over here it is right up there with Christmas. And Christmas came early for me this year as well... after several month of waiting for my stimulus check (yes... its the one from early this year, thanks Mr. Bush!) I finally got it the day before Thanksgiving! I guess bureaucracy is the same everywhere ;-) But that gives me the opportunity to have a fantastic festive dinner!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Crazy Vending Machines

Well... since I am over here I spotted several crazy vending machines... one of my first posts was about a Sony vending machine where you could by MP3 players and cell phone. The funniest one so far was the lobster vending machine where you could grab a living lobster and get it cooked while you wait. But the most specialized one is the Rosetta Stone vending machine at the Las Vegas airport. Who is deciding at the airport that it would be better to learn the language of your target destination? I agree there might be connection but as soon as you talk about a price tag of $499 I am not so sure if I would use a vending machine at an airport to make this purchase. Anyhow... I still got a blast out of that machine anyway by running the demo for the German class... it was just like home... just like home :-)

Vegas and beyond

As I mentioned earlier... I stayed at the medieval themed hotel called Excalibur which has a signature show... the Tournament of Kings which is basically a jousting (knight tournament) show as part of a medieval dinning experience. So while you are eating with your bare hands, drinking lots of beer and wine you see some skilled sword and axe fights. Really impressive.

To get everybody into tournament mood they are separating the arena in different kingdoms... my king was Hungary and to make it short he sucked. But still a great show though :-)

The next show I attended was Cirque du Soleil's 'Ka' which should be well known all around the globe by now. It is interesting to see how popular those artists are as every major casino seem to have their own Cirque du Soleil show these days.

But after watching this show it is easy to understand why... each of those stunds would be spectacular taken by itself... but having so many people on the stage doing breathtaking things at the same time combined with a simple enough story and fantastic costumes... that makes it astonishing.

So all together a great trip to Vegas... did I mention that I also won $10 gambling? Can you ask for more? ;-)

Viva Las Vegas

Viva Las Vegas... once again ;-) After some rough weeks at work I was ready for a quick getaway. And what better destination then a place full of casinos, bars, pools and shows? On top of all that temperatures in the high 70 F (20+ C) and sunshine... because its in a middle of a dessert, man! It's hard to beet that...

That's what brought me back to Vegas... This time I stayed at the Excalibur which is this medieval themed casino with lots of links to king Arthur and his knights of the round table. And I met them all in person :-) But that's a story for the next post already.

Winter is here

Finally winter made its comeback. After a quite weird few weeks with temperatures in the high 70 F (20+ C) we got back to normality again. Snow in the mountains and the foothills, low temperatures down here in Denver and Longmont. And most of the ski resort are opening these weekends so we are up for a jolly good time ;-)

Bloody (Mary) Sunday Morning

It doesn't happen that often anymore that you go out for some early drinks in the morning. Lucky enough there is the European Meet-up-group of Denver... so we had a Bloody Mary Sunday at 11 o'clock. Sweet :-)

On the picture you can see the hard core of that group after moving to the next bar at 4 o'clock. That brings back memories of Dublin... :o)

Election showdown

Well... finally we don't have to watch all those TV adds anymore, don't have to run into campaign supporters in shopping malls and have to answer phone calls of phone robots. And the winner is... Barack Obama! Even though it looked like a quite close call last week... at the election night everything moved very quickly towards Obama. Already at 8 o'clock it looked quite bad for McCain.

At that time McCain already had to win most of the swing states as Obama won the most important high density states in the east. But still an interesting night with lots of news network entertainment around that. Most of the stations had again their sports-like view of the swing states where they were drawing strategies on the map... and CNN had even live holograms from all over the country where people were shown in 3D at the studio. Interesting how different these broadcasts are from those in Europe :-)

And in the end I was able to vote too! Just kidding... I just found one 'I voted' sticker on the sidewalk. For a moment I was tempted to get myself a free Starbucks coffee or a free ice cone at Ben & Jerrie's for voters. Oh well... I'll have free pretzels at the upcoming general election in Germany instead ;-)

But in the end I am very happy that I was here while history was in the making. Congratulations to Obama and good luck for his first term. It'll be a though one with all the problems right now which certainly will restrict him from implementing his programs simply because of the lack of money. But I am confident that after several years of stagnation America will move in the right directing now. So much from Ekki's election studio and now back to normality :-)

Election countdown

Things are heading up over here... only 2 more days to election day and both campaigns are using the last remaining hours smearing each other. My European readers will ask now if the race is not decided yet looking at the latest polls. But the strange system over here with the electoral vote making it possible winning even with loosing by the number of voters. This divides the country in save banks for each party and the battleground states where the voters are not decided yet. Either way 100% of the votes will go to one winner in that states that's why it is not over yet.

And there is also the so-called Bradley effect which makes the race even more interesting. Apparently the political correctness over here is spoiling the result of polls in elections like that. So even though the polls are showing Obama's lead right now, nothing is decided till Tuesday. That's why everyone is still keeping campaigning I guess...

...and writing books. While there are several books about Sarah Palin describing her raise from a Hokey Mom to fighting the establishment (I really didn't see that, oh well) I couldn't find any book about McCain. Maybe they were sold out???

Also I found a book about Obama... in the children section!!! I thought that was a bit strange... so if you want to read your children a bed time story, why not about a politicans?! That makes sense to me now... politics, put you to sleep since 1776 ;-)