EDC Week 2012

Getting Ready

Soon after our festival tickets, flights, and hotels were booked, the girls of the group going to EDC went shopping for daisies, rhinestones, and beads to make costumes and kandi. We had been excitedly looking up outfit references and planning our own.

Dressing for a rave is sort of like dressing for Halloween: you have the opportunity to decorate yourself with all of the ridiculous things you want to but don’t in order to fit in with proper society. Raves allow you to express yourself and it’s so true that the saying itself has become a cliché.

And so, armed with colorful flowers, sparkling rhinestones, and a multitude of beads, we began putting our costumes together.

 

Arriving In Vegas

After months of anticipation, EDC Week was finally upon us. My friend Elaine and I left on the Wednesday. Since all of the DJs playing at EDC would be heading to Vegas, Insomniac, the event organizers, decided to put on EDC Week where the DJs would play at clubs around town as a build-up to the main event.

Because flights were several hundred dollars cheaper out of Bellingham, a small town south of the border in the US, Elaine and I booked an early morning shuttle to the airport in Bellingham.

At the airport, we coincidentally ran into several friends who were also heading to Vegas on the same flight. As you may sometimes hear, Vancouver is a small city and everyone seems to know everyone else and run-ins occur on a regular basis.

We had woken up before dawn and were exhausted by the time we reached our hotel so we first took a nap before venturing out onto the Strip.

 

A Walk Around The Strip

I hadn’t been to Vegas for 4 years and was interested in seeing what had changed in that time. The last time I visited in 2008, the Cosmopolitan complex was still under construction and I was eager to see it in completion.

We stayed at the Luxor first the first 2 nights (and would meet up with the rest of our group at Treasure Island when they came to join us on the Friday). We ventured out into the Vegas sun mid-afternoon and slowly made our way down the Strip.

There used to be a Rainforest Cafe in Vancouver, which closed down in the early 2000s. I still have fond memories of friends going there for birthday parties where we would all marvel at the unique decor and simulated thunderstorms. Elaine and I wanted to revisit our childhood and stopped by the Rainforest Cafe in Vegas for dinner, marvelling at the decor and thunderstorms the same way we used to.

The M&M store in Vegas is a huge shop with wall after wall lined with every type of M&M imaginable.

We essentially just spent our first afternoon wandering around the Strip and taking in the overwhelming sights that make up Vegas.

At this point in time, EDM hadn’t quite caught on to the mainstream yet so club promoters were still hard at work trying to fill their venues nightly. After our walk around town, we returned to the hotel with more free passes than we knew what to do with.

 

 

Girls Night Out In Vegas

We chose to go see Chuckie at LAVO in the Palazzo. I had been to LAVO on my previous trip but didn’t remember much and wanted to see it again. Chuckie threw down a bouncy, dirty set complete with ample profanity as he shouted at the crowd .

An Afternoon Of Pool Parties

We had a lot of invites to a lot of pool parties the next day and attempted to go to them all.

The day started relatively early at 2pm when we made it to Wet Republic at MGM. Because it was early (by Vegas standards), not a whole lot of people were out yet.

Afterwards, we made our way over to TAO Beach at the Venetian. To get to the pool club, visitors are directed through the Venetian pool deck, a lush series of pools, hot tubs, waterfalls, and trees.

Afterwards, we stopped for dinner and headed over to the new Boulevard Pool at the Cosmopolitan for the afterparty of the EDMbiz Conference, a conference held by Insomnia discussing the ins and outs of the rapidly growing EDM scene.

The Boulevard Pool is located on a rooftop of the Cosmopolitan, is beautifully designed and lavish in the way Vegas does, and provides a great view of the Strip.

 

ATB and Dash Berlin at TAO

We danced in pool in front of the DJ stage for a while before heading back to our hotel to get ready for our party plans that night.

Now, we are from Vancouver, where nightlife is, for lack of the better word, lame. There are numerous restrictions about when events have to end, venues events are allowed to be held at, strict liquor laws, etc. so we were eager to make the most of our time in Vegas.

Elaine I researched all of the DJs we wanted to see during EDC Week and bought tickets in advance. We didn’t know at that point that all we needed to do was show up and walk around the streets, and promoters would borderline beg us to get to their events.

So we had bought tickets for ATB and Dash Berlin at TAO prior to arriving only to run into a promoter who added us to a free cover list for the same event. At least now we know. No more eager beavers.

TAO has a distinctive Asian flair complete with lotus flowers and glowing Chinese phrases on the wall.

It was also packed. Vegas clubs are always extremely packed in a way I’m not used to at Vancouver clubs. I’m guessing they don’t have the same capacity limits that is imposed in Vancouver and their doormen are a lot more liberal with letting people in rather than having them accumulate outside to give the impression that the club is exclusive and busy in the way doormen in Vancouver enjoy.

We eventually made our way up to the pool deck connected to the club, which is actually TAO Beach where we had been earlier. The area looked very different at night and Top 40 drifted over the speakers. People came up to take a breather from the intense dance party happening below and then went back when they were ready.

Now, to this day, I’m not quite sure what happened but I think I was roofied. We met up with a group of people who were something akin to friends of friends of friends and joined their table. They were pouring pineapple juice and vodka complete with glowing ice cubes, as in lights frozen into ice cubes.

I wasn’t as concerned about personal safety in 2012 as I am now, but I was still rather aware of watching drinks being poured straight from the bottle.

Somehow, sometime throughout the night, I started blacking out. I drank a decent amount but I also know my limits.

I then woke up the next day.

Elaine said she had to semi-carry me out and kept telling the people we were with that we would be fine getting back to our hotel in a cab. Two guys apparently followed us all the way out to the hotel lobby, offering to give us a ride back to our hotel and she had to tell them multiple times that we were fine.

I also felt absolutely terrible for the next three days. I wasn’t able to eat solid foods and had trouble keeping even water down. It put a huge damper on my EDC experience, which was nevertheless incredible.