Las Vegas baby!

Friday 8 August 2008.
Longview (Car)–> Portland (plane)–> Vegas

The morning was spent packing and re-packing, deciding what to take and pack at the top because it was needed in Vegas, what to pack lower down to dig out before we left for NZ and what could just be left behind.

I had an apple pastry doughnut thing for breakfast, it was yum. The dough was really soft and crispy. It was much softer than the ring doughnuts we get in NZ – apparently they are called ‘cake doughnuts’. Doughnuts seem more like a breakfast food (like pancakes) now I’ve had a proper one, the cake doughnuts we get in NZ always seemed too heavy that early in the day.

Drove to Portland, flew to Vegas. On the way, I noticed that America is BIG. I knew it before, but it’s different when you’re looking at it through the window when you’re flying thirty-thousand feet up. The ground below fades into the distance and instead of seeing the flat horizon like you do over NZ, there are distant, hazy mountains and that’s probably only the centre of the country!

I will add a quick aside to complain about the state of American domestic airlines. If you want to take more than one piece of checked luggage, they charge you $25/ On the plane, there is no snack offered and you have to pay for any drinks you want - even tea and coffee was $1! ...rhubarbrhubarb..Stupid airlines..rhubarbrhubarb...

Las Vegas is in the middle of a desert. It was originally founded because of the springs there, and some of the hotels might still use the springs as a water supply (hear-say). As you’re flying over, there’s nothing for miles and miles and miles. Well, ok, I admit there is lots of sand and rocks, but not a lot of variety. It’s pretty impressive looking in a stark and hilly way.

Eventually I could see some random green squares and circles where things were growing, so people must have been irrigating.

Then, suddenly there were bare developments, roads laid out into neighbourhoods with no houses. (I was advised that construction was started for new neighbourhoods but then abandoned due to housing slump etc.) A bit further in, and there are little monopoly houses, all looking square and the same and all butting up close to each other with no yards. The city mostly seems to be the same height, until you get into the centre of town with great big buildings (hotels), one of which is in the shape of a pyramid. The Luxor is a pyramid, all tinted glass down the outside and capped with lights that beam up into the night sky.

Our entrance into Las Vegas was an interesting experience – the plane was temperature controlled, of course. When we walked into the umbilical tunnel to get back to the terminal it was pretty warm. That’s to be expected, we’re in a desert, and surely it’ll be cooler in the terminal. When we walked out into the terminal, it wasn’t much cooler at all, even with the air conditioning. Right outside the gate where we disembarked were a bank of pokie machines. As we walked through to the baggage claim there were advertisements for shows, hotels and even more gambling machines. Welcome to Las Vegas!!!!

We were staying in one of the monopoly houses – three stories high and narrow, about the width of a good size double garage. It was still a pretty good size inside though, 2 dbl bedrooms plus master, study, 2 bathrooms, good sized kitchen, dining and lounge.

We had pizza for dinner. Thin crust, delicious sauce, giant size pieces. I think pizza is called Chicago style when it has a thin crust, and New York style with a thick crust. I didn’t end up having any thick crust pizza, but in general the pizza was much better than any of the fast-food pizzas we get in NZ. I can’t remember enough to compare it to Hell, sorry.

After dinner we headed out to the Strip. The number of billboards advertising shows (Tom Jones, Barbara Streisand, Cris Angel, Cirque de Solei), cars, large neon signs and gigantic hotels were just amazing.

The first stop was the Bellagio to see the water show. There was a big pond, with water fountains that can shoot water up at different times and heights and pivot to the sides, creating patterns in time to the music played over a PA system. Everyone was crowding around the balconies at the edge to watch. The first song playing was Viva Las Vegas (Elvis) which I thought was quite appropriate. After that my friend and I shifted to get a better position for the next one (um... it was in Italian I think, possibly opera?) and got more of the full effect. It’s really neat to watch. Brad Pitt and George Clooney stand in front of the water show at the end of Ocean’s Eleven. Someone said there was a Celine Dion song in the repertoire, but fortunately it didn’t play while I was nearby!

As I was watching the water shooting up into the air, spray being blown sideways by the breeze, I couldn’t help but think that it was a waste. I don’t know how much it costs to get water to Las Vegas, but a whole lot of it gets left out and evaporated for the pleasure of viewing it. While I was there, I was drinking bottled water a lot and eating off paper plates some of the time. I felt bad throwing the plastic bottles away – I do try to recycle, and the other people we’d been staying with were more into recycling as well. It all just contributed to the sense of decadence and waste. Don’t get me wrong – I’d go back again tomorrow if I could! I’d just try and find somewhere to recycle my plastics.

Next we went inside the Bellagio to look at their ‘garden’. Apparently it’s changed around every few months. Um, I didn’t actually take any pictures of it (possibly a mistake) and I can’t remember much about it now. It was in a big atrium section, there was green stuff growing, it was all very controlled within the beds and grown in patterns. They had little statues and fountain things (jumping water) around the place. There were at least 3 different displays with different themes. One of the displays had a very large animatronics bird moving, I think it was meant to be an eagle.

We walked around gawking at everything (ok, I did most of the gawking) the rooms, the carpet, the floors, the staff, the customers and the ceiling. ‘Why the ceiling?’ you may ask. Most of the hotels had interesting things on the ceiling and the Bellagio was no exception, although they took it a little further than most. In one section, they had a garden of glass mushroom-flowers growing out of the ceiling. Each flower was on a stalk about 40-50cm tall and had a flat top in all sorts of colours and spots. There were lights set above them, so it really brought out the colours and almost made them look glowing.

We walked across a bridge over the road to get to more hotels to look at. There were so many hotels with different sections, casinos, shops, restaurants and different hotels actually linked to each other so it can be quite hard to tell where the next one begins.

The whole city environment is extremely disorienting, I can’t remember if it was dark from the time we first went out, or if the sun set when we were in one of the hotels. When you are outside there are so many people, so many lights and it’s so warm that it doesn’t feel like night time at all. There are girls walking around in clubbing outfits and for once they don’t look underdressed. Every third person you see is carrying some sort of alcoholic slushy drink, probably alcoholic.

We headed into the hotel called Paris. When we walked in, all of a sudden it was open, light, a pleasant temperature, and when you looked up the ceiling was painted like a blue sky with little white clouds. All the shops and restaurants had facings on them to look like Parisian shops and the floor was fake cobblestones. I was quite pleased that I hadn’t been to Paris because if I’d seen the real deal, the hotel would have looked like a crass imitation. As it was, it looked pretty neat but still quite fake.

People talk about all the casinos in Las Vegas – these are mostly within the hotels. You get free parking in the parking buildings because they want you to come in and spend money. There is valet parking everywhere - I’m sure I saw it at the supermarket or some generic department store like Target. The shows are also in the hotels. I hadn’t really thought about it before but the hotels are just so massive, and a lot of the space isn’t even rooms for customers.

Like I said, casinos, restaurants, clothes shops, shoe shops, jewellery shops, art shops, souvenir shops, bars, pubs, stages and seating for shows, ‘time zone’ games arcades… that’s everything I can think of that I saw in the hotels. Then there are the things that you don’t see, like the laundry which must be massive to accommodate so many guests. Since I’m into lists, these are the hotels I remember visiting on this night are: Bellagio, Paris, Caesars Palace and Planet Hollywood.

Las Vegas law allows smoking in casinos, but not in the rest of the hotels. So you walk past the pokies and there are a whole lot of people with cigars. Obviously the ventilation is pretty good to keep the air fresh in such a massive open area. Something else I noticed was that the air quality was very high in the casino area, apart from patches of smoke caused by individual people. It was kept at a nice temperature and humidity and was generally much more pleasant than being outside. People have accused the hotels of pumping oxygen into the gambling areas to keep people alert for longer (where did the last 2 days just go?!) but the casinos have denied this happens. The lack of windows and constant light also would help the 24 hour gambling effect.

At some point, probably not too much past midnight, we went home. I noticed that the hotels have moving walkways into them, but not back out. That gives you the chance to read all the advertisements on the walls rather than having to watch where you’re going.

It was a pretty exhausting day trying to look at so many things but I had a great time and crashed out pretty quickly once we were home.