Category: Local Vegas Spots

Life is Beautiful Weekend | 2018

Fresh coconuts, good weather, and even better company… Life got a little more beautiful in downtown Vegas last weekend when Life is Beautiful came back to town! The line up was pretty similar to Coachella’s with The Weeknd, Miguel, and Daniel Caesar as a few of the headliners, but the artists were just that good that I had to see them again! Plus, it didn’t hurt that LAUV, T-Pain, Florence + The Machine, Bastille, Arcade Fire and N.E.R.D. were there.

Here’s a recap of the weekend!

DAY 1 | Park on Fremont, The Weeknd & Daniel Caesar

My cousins and I arrived downtown and had a few drinks at the Park on Fremont—a super cozy bar with the nicest ambience and the cutest patio—before heading to the festival. We hung out at Container Park for a few hours and watched local performers beatbox and breakdance, before getting serenaded by Daniel Caesar and ending our night dancing to The Weeknd.

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DAY 2 | Exploring the festival grounds, N.E.R.D., Miguel, and Florence + The Machine

We arrived a couple of hours before our first set to explore the festival grounds and there was a lot to see! We visited the “Crime on Canvas” art gallery, admired a lot of the street art, and spent the rest of our night sipping on fresh coconuts while dancing to Miguel and Florence!

Top, bandana, and harem pants from ASOS.com | Shoes: Nike Cortez

DAY 3 | LAUV, T-Pain, Bastille, ODESZA, Blackbear, and Arcade Fire

This was our longest day, but it was also our best! We saw so many performances from Bastille to Blackbear, and we briefly saw ODESZA and Arcade Fire, although we were so sad we didn’t get to see their whole set! My favorites of the day though, (or maybe even the whole weekend 🤫) was T-Pain and LAUV! I knew LAUV would be amazing, but he was even way better than I anticipated! And T-Pain’s set was so. much. FUN. I felt like I was in middle school again, hearing him perform so many of his old songs. The whole crowd was singing loud and dancing hard, and it really made the weekend that much more memorable to me!

Pants from ASOS.com | Body suit from Capezio | Sunglasses from Abella Eyewear | Crystals from Silver Post USA

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Life is Beautiful really can’t be compared to other music festivals. It’s got its own charm. Located at the heart of downtown Las Vegas, it’s giving a new name to our budding downtown community. Vegas is becoming more than just The Strip, and Life is Beautiful is one of the reasons why. I loved getting to enjoy my city like this! And I know you guys will too.

Check out my VLOG below from Life is Beautiful!

Lots of love,

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Hogwarts Just Got a Little Closer To Home (& It Brought a Lot of Espresso With It!)

A new coffee shop in Nevada brews up magical caffeine concoctions for Henderson and Las Vegas locals.

Bad Owl Coffee is a Harry Potter themed coffee shop, full of decorations that allude to the Harry Potter series, and as an avid Harry Potter fan, it’s become my favorite place to hang out!

As soon as a customer walks in, they are transported to King’s Cross Station, where they’ll find “Platform 9 6/8” (photographed on the left) that mimics Platform 9Âľ from the Harry Potter series.

Half a luggage cart disappears into the wall, and Hedwig, Harry’s owl, is placed on top of the cart, just like in the story!

While the all of the decor I photographed at Bad Owl Coffee was well-put-together and well-thought-out, the photo on the left is my favorite because it’s part of a signature Harry Potter moment that every fan knows.

It was a bit difficult to photograph the decor because the coffee shop is always packed with people, but I tried to do the coffee shop justice as a fan.

I used my Canon EOS Rebel T5 camera and had the perfect natural lighting for some of the photos so I didn’t need to do much adjusting or editing. When I photographed the coffee shop at night, I did have to manually adjust my camera to make the photos brighter.

Nonetheless, Bad Owl Coffee has great lighting for photos and you’ll notice that people can’t resist but to take them!

The tables are decorated with customized decals that allude to the Harry Potter series, such as Harry’s lightning scar, the Deathly Hallows sign, the snitch from Harry’s first Quidditch game and many more. There’s also a bookshelf display with the Harry Potter books in them near the lounge area that resembles the Hogwarts common rooms.

“It’s a different environment,” said Kristina Hamlin, UNLV student and Bad Owl Coffee barista. “You walk in and it’s all Harry Potter.”

While Bad Owl Coffee’s décor caught people’s attention, their drinks, pastries and sandwiches get customers to stay.

“The most popular drink would have to be our Butter Brew latte which is our version of the Butterbeer drink from Harry Potter,” Hamlin said.

The drink was so popular that they would run out, but they now make sure they are fully stocked on the ingredients. While the Butter Brew latte is what a lot of people order, they offer a variety of other specialty drinks such as their earl grey tea called “The London Fog,” their English toffee latte and their pistachio latte.

There are also special drinks from their “Espresso Bar” such as the “Mint Mojito Latte” and the “Biscoff Cookie latte,” a cookie butter drink which is riddikulus-ly good! (See what I did there, fellow Potter fans?)

Hamlin also added that most men order their nitrogen-infused cold brew coffee.

“When I tell the customers— especially the male customers— that the nitrogen-infused coffee is like Guinness without the alcohol, they automatically order it,” Hamlin said. “I highly recommend it for strong coffee drinkers, but for those who aren’t heavy coffee drinkers, the sea salt nitro is milder.”

Bad Owl Coffee also offers pastries such as almond croissants, butter croissants, chocolate croissants, macarons and many more pastry selections delivered fresh every morning from a local bakery.

They also recently developed a sandwich menu so that customers can enjoy a meal there for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Bad Owl Coffee has been featured on Cosmopolitan, Fox, Eater, Las Vegas Weekly, Las Vegas Review-Journal and Thrillist, and is located at 10575 S. Eastern Ave. #160, Henderson, Nevada.

Browse through their menu and find which magic-infused pastry and espresso you want to try.

Happy eating and ‘caffeinating’!