Las Vegas
Hmm, so I created this post a while ago in draft form, and apparently all I had written about Las Vegas is: "It is shiny". This is certainly true, and indeed it's really the only thing about Vegas; the city is very light on substance and to the casual traveller seems nothing like a real city that people could live in. There must be areas of it with houses, schools, parks and businesses that aren't based around tourist entertainment, but we didn't see them. I've seen episodes of CSI where people get murdered in them. Apparently Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the United States, which is just crazy, especially since they don't have any water. The place is in the middle of a desert, it's a big sprawling mess of city and casino, none of it feels very productive - I don't know why anybody would want to live there, I really don't. But what do I know about it, I only spent one night in the place.
We were staying at the Luxor, which is an enormous black shiny glass pyramid, with rooms all up the four sides of the pyramids and a casino in the middle. The rooms were all in rows up the slant, so to get to them you had to take a sideways elevator called an 'inclinator'. This reminded one of Charlie's Great Glass Elevator, and felt very weird in the stomach. Our room was pretty decent, and quite cheap ($80, whereas the night before it had been $300-odd for Memorial Day weekend). We arrived at our hotel in the afternoon, and pretty much hid in our room and by the pool until dark. Las Vegas felt a little intimidating during the day, too hot and big and a little sordid; the fact that this was our first big unfamiliar city after weeks of National Parks also freaked us out a little.
Once it got dark we went out to the strip, which was just so much fun. You could wander in and out of any casino you liked, and they were all just ridiculously decorated. Some of them had themes, some of them the only theme was massive lack of taste. 'New York, New York' was our favourite, but only the whole we enjoyed the mass of neon and tack. Things looked so very much better at night, too. The above is Caesar's Palace. Like so many things in America, I only know about this place through an episode of Friends. (You know, the one where Joey works there?)
We were staying at the Luxor, which is an enormous black shiny glass pyramid, with rooms all up the four sides of the pyramids and a casino in the middle. The rooms were all in rows up the slant, so to get to them you had to take a sideways elevator called an 'inclinator'. This reminded one of Charlie's Great Glass Elevator, and felt very weird in the stomach. Our room was pretty decent, and quite cheap ($80, whereas the night before it had been $300-odd for Memorial Day weekend). We arrived at our hotel in the afternoon, and pretty much hid in our room and by the pool until dark. Las Vegas felt a little intimidating during the day, too hot and big and a little sordid; the fact that this was our first big unfamiliar city after weeks of National Parks also freaked us out a little.
Once it got dark we went out to the strip, which was just so much fun. You could wander in and out of any casino you liked, and they were all just ridiculously decorated. Some of them had themes, some of them the only theme was massive lack of taste. 'New York, New York' was our favourite, but only the whole we enjoyed the mass of neon and tack. Things looked so very much better at night, too. The above is Caesar's Palace. Like so many things in America, I only know about this place through an episode of Friends. (You know, the one where Joey works there?)
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