Las Vegas and my Trip to get a T-Mobile SIM.

My first full days experience was a bit of an eye opener. The main goal for the day was to get a T-Mobile SIM.  This was a little bit difficult because I didn't have a map of vegas, except my computer.  I went into a casino and was able to get a map of the strip, which I marked the closest T-Mobile seller.  Out I went, only realising later I had left the map in my room.  I eventually found where the store was meant to be, only to find a casino.

I decided to go on and have a look at the vegas strip, while looking for somewhere I could get internet access to look up alternative locations.  I got on the duece bus.  I thought at least I might get off the strip with this eventually, as I had lost hope of finding internet on the strip.

After some time I decided to get off the duece bus.  This place still had a heap of casinos and poker machines, but looked more like it had seen better days compared to the strip.  I saw quite a few offices of lawyers saying they dealt with "arrest bonds".  Eventually I found a krespy creams with an open wireless access point which I then used to locate an alternative T-Mobile store, and find where I was.  This showed me I was in "Downtown Las Vegas". Using this info, I walked for quite some time passing two large courtroom buildings - each individually larger than the high court of Australias building.

One thing I noticed was there was a line up outside a shop that buys "Gold and Silver".  I wonder if this means that the Gold/Silver market is toping or whether it is just the people desperate to raise some cash after a dramatic price rise in gold and especially silver price.

I gave up walking and found a bus that took me directly past the shopping center that had the t-mobile store.  This shopping center had a huge car park, but 2/3 to 3/4 of the car park was empty.  I think it reveals the damage the global financial crisis has done to Las Vegas. I got my T-mobile sim, only to discover that my phone, which I thought was not network locked, was network locked.  So this is not the end of my quest for phone/internet access.

By this part of  the day it was getting towards 4-5PM, so I made my way back to where I was staying, with a slight detour to take some photos of some of the Casinos at dusk.