And then I got shanked.

Vegas is beautiful. And scary. Really. Effing. Scary.

There are two sides to the strip: the fancy side and the dumpy side. I don't know which direction is which or I would share, but the fancy side has hotels and the dumpy side has hobos. And good shopping apparently according to my co-worker Linda, but I was only concerned with the hoodlums.

So Sunday night (our first night in Vegas) we took a tram from Mandalay Bay (the hotel we stayed at) to the Luxor (the end of the line) and then walked to the Bellagio where Cirque du Soleil "O" is. Logically, not wanting to be shanked, we walked on the classy side of the street. It took at least six hours. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but it was a long effing walk. The problem is that on that side of the street you have to go up and down like a dozen sets of stairs along the way so that you don´t get run over. At one point we had to walk through a mall just to get back down from a climb up a set of stairs. It literally makes the walk almost twice as long.

We arrived at the Bellagio dehydrated and exhausted (that would have been about hour 20 for me), but alive. We saw the show (which was the best amazing production IN ANY MEDIUM that I have ever seen and gave me my twelve-millionth life goal) and then walked back. This time we decided to treat safety as we had been money and said ¨Fuck it, it's vacation!¨ And walked on the dumpy side which is sooooo much nicer because there are no stairs! It was now hour 24 for me and not much better for the rest of the gang (Kayla and her AMAZING parents) and we were sooooo tired. So anyways, we're walking along and decided to stop at McDonald's for a late dinner. I'm only bringing that up because Kayla's mom made a funny when a drunk, young guy wandered in and made a fool of himself at which point Kayla's mom said,"I remember my first beer." Hilarious.

Anyways, we stuffed our faces and continued on. We did pretty well most the way. It probably helped that Kayla looked like she was so exhausted that she would take down anyone who looked at her the wrong way. Heels and exhaustion don't mix. We didn't have any issues until we neared the Luxor. Suddenly there was a VERY large many walking very close behind Kayla and me. Her parents were ahead of us. Kayla could probably have taken the guy down with a heel through the eye, but I couldn't leave anything to chance. So I let her get a step ahead of me. Chivalry is not dead. I took that step back so that I could take the knife. And by "take the knife," I mean ¨let the bad man stab me so that Kayla and her parents could get away." And then I died. Except that's a lie. Nothing happened. The guy was probably a librarian or something. Though if anyone is going to be a serial killer, wouldn't you expect it to be someone unlikely like a librarian?