Sooo, Vegas!
Sep. 9th, 2005 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kodalaiKept meaning to get around to writing up an entry about Vegas.
Overall impression: 1) Vegas is hot, dry, and bright. Moving along...
2) The Las Vegas Strip is exorbitant in the extreme. They have it set up to be flashy night and day. All the buildings are made to be gorgeous, visible, and flashy -- one of the hotels, Mandeley Bay, is gold-colored all over the outside. Others are bright pink, or striped in curves of red and blue, or shaped like black basalt pyramids, or what have you. There are giant video screens all around, some belonging to specific hotels, some just generally advertising the Strip. There are fountains and gardens everywhere. Many of the hotel/casino/towers (the towers are the kings, here. I don't expect you to keep track of them, because I couldn't, but every time I toss out a name, envision a huge, thirty-story-or-so hotel, with a casino taking up the bottom floor or so, huge theaters for performances, surrounded by gardens and landscaping and themed scenery -- different themes for each one) have free shows every half hour or hour or so to anyone who wants to walk by them.
At night it's even better, or worse, depending on your perspective. You've all heard about the glittering Strip at night. It's bright as noon to walk down it, and they love to show off. Everything, and I mean everything, is lined in lights. Not just the towers, but even the McDonalds and the Walgreens are outlined in glittering, flashing lights. Some of the shows only start after dark. While we were there, we saw three -- a lights-and-music show at the fountains in front of the Bellagio, a pirates ship battle in front of Treasure Island, and an exploding volcano outside the Mirage.
Indoors is just as exorbitant as outdoors. The hotel rooms were nothing special (at least, they weren't at the Palace Station, where we were staying, but that was a smaller tower off the Strip that gave off a distinct air of wannabe) but the interior decorating was spacious, luxurious, and inviting. The food everywhere we went in the Strip ranged from good to excellent, and the alcohol was extremely free. Most of the casinos gave out free drinks -- beer, wine, coffee, water, apple juice, whatever you'd like if they have it. (You have to catch one of the waitresses, though, and it's hard.) Because it was Labor Day, things were overpriced, but still surprisingly affordable -- during the normal course of things, everything from food to drink to shows to hotel rooms are bordering on the cheap. It's quite possible to have a wonderful time in Vegas on surprisingly little money.
But the one thing you have to keep in mind during all of this, which Vegas does its level best to hide from you, is that the towers can afford to give you free shows and free alcohol and cheap rooms and cheap foods and six dollar amusement parks and video games and whatever else they have. They can afford it because of all the people that come into Vegas and lose their money gambling. So very, very much money pours into the casinos, with hundreds or thousands of individuals spending thousands, even millions of dollars per day in every hotel sets the funds for these glittering splendors. The slots machines offer fabulous payouts, hundreds or thousands or as much as half a million dollars or more, depending. But that's still only a drop in the bucket in how much they're taking in. And what they take in is what they take away from people.
I'm not, mind you, condemning it as a business. But one has to keep ones head, and it's hard to do among all the dazzle. I'd never seen anyone so totally seduced by the Megabucks mentality before I went to Vegas. Sera's parents (sorry, Sera, gonna talk about them for a while) were so into it it was scary. Her father, apparently, plays video poker with $100 bills at a time, and loses steadily, and just puts more in. The day we got there, when he ran out of money and had hit his ATM withdrawal limit, he asked Sera to take $300 out of her account so he could continue gambling, and that he'd pay her back with his winnings. Her mother said (frequently) that if she wasn't such a good gambler, winning steadily and then giving him the money she won, he'd lose all their money. Sera's mother was almost worse than her dad, in a way. She often repeated that it only took a quarter to win hundreds of thousands of dollars, that it was a smart investment, that you only lived once and should make the most of it, that you had to take chances to succeed in lifew, and that you'd never win that half million prize if you never played. Your parents are nice people, Sera, but when a pair of grown adults are encouraging their unemployed daughter to spend her college money in casinos, that's scary stuff.
For the most part I stayed away from the casinos and the slot machines, although I did play a few rounds of video blackjack (lost $10) and a few rounds of some strange nickel slots game (won $10.) Just personally, I actually had more fun watching the coins go round and round in that charity drop in Caeser's Forum Shops, but maybe that's just because I'm easily amused. That's ok, though, I'd be just as happy not to develop a taste for gambling.
Pina Coladas are a different matter.
Now, on to the specific events.
I went to Sera's house direct from work on Friday. Between traffic and closing, I didn't get there until 8 PM or so, but that was all right, since we weren't going to leave until midnight anyway. Aoi was there already. We sat around chatting and squeeing over girly stuff (Sera brought out a gift box she had of awesome makeup) and, of course, watching television, until Sera's dad came home and fussed us all out the door. It really was about 12:30 by the time we got going. He wanted to drive at night to avoid crowds (and sun,) which turned out to be a good plan. I'd heard the Vegas drive was 7 or 8 hours, but we got to Primm (right outside of Vegas) at half past four. Please note, for now and future, that it is not really feasible to sleep in the back of Sera's dad's car. There's no room, for one thing, the air circulation is unfortunate, he plays the radio fairly loud, and let's just say I see where Sera got her lane-changing technique from. Anyway.
We got to Primm at around 4:30 and decided to stop there for a while -- first for bathrooms, then stayed to gamble. Yes, right across the Nevada line, there's a grand glittering casino. Wannabe Vegas, a bit? Hmm. Aoi, Sera and I wandered off to get breakfast, and then ended up going to sleep in the car until the sun rose and made that impossible.
Did I mention that Vegas is very bright? It is.
We were woken after an hour or two of napping to drive the rest of the way into Vegas, although to be honest I dozed more on that drive than the entire trek beforehand. Here we get to the unfortunate part of the trip, where we turned up at the hotel at 7 AM, only to discover we couldn't check in until -- not even 11 AM, which we'd thought, but 3 PM. And at this point all of us (at least all three of us) were far too exhausted to contemplate doing anything but sleep. So, we essentially spend the next eight ours kipped out on the couches in the hotel lobby. And that lobby was FREEZING cold. At one point I was alternating between dozing on the cough, and going outside to doze on the bench because it was warm.
Ar arount 1:30, 2 PM, they finally did let us check in. So we dragged our bags up, had a brief squabble over how to fit five of us into two beds (the three of us squashed into one, although after that we got a rollaway) and then slept for several hours.
When we woke up, refreshed, it was time to hit the town. My memory of many of these events is somewhat confused and out of order, but I'll see what I can do. We ate dinner, then went out deciding to see some shows and head over to Gameworks. We did end up seeing the lights-and-fountains show at the Bellagio, then schlepped over to the GW. I wish now we hadn't, though. It was far -- we had to buy monorail passes, which was cool, although we didn't end up using all of them -- and by the time we got there, the grill was closed, and the place was actually fairly empty. It also wasn't terribly clean, either the arcade or the, ugh, bathrooms. There really weren't many good games, and of those that were there, two out of the three that I wanted to play were, in fact, broken. The big down of the evening, though, was that while I was there, somebody picked my pocket to the tune of over a hundred dollars.
The next day was our day designated for clubbing. I was interested in going to see Madam Tousad's (sp) waxworks, but it never really came to pass, alas. We also went to Circus Circus, the -- well, I'm sure you can guess the theme. We walked the midway, drooled over the free acrobat shows, played skeeball in the arcade (I myself played the Soul Calibur II they had there, and beat arcade mode with Kilik, ha!) and ended up with a confounding amount of small plush animals and a large plush Batman. Then we moved on into Adventure Dome, their indoor amusement park, where we spent the day quite happily riding roller coasters and bumper cars, though we never did get to the log flume ride. Then it was time to go back to the hotel and pretty ourselves up for clubbing.
Never really been clubbing before, don't think it's really my scene, although I could see the appeal. We settled on going to Area 54, on the grounds that it was free for women to get in (although cos of the holiday we ended up paying $10 each anyway.) We also stopped for a late (10PM) dinner before going on in, and discovered the wonders of peanut butter pie. Oh. Wow.
Yeah -- clubbing. The DJs were actually quite good, or so Sera judged. The music I agree was nice, although I don't really dance. There were Smirnoffs and Midori sours, and shirtless male dances, so
tbc
Overall impression: 1) Vegas is hot, dry, and bright. Moving along...
2) The Las Vegas Strip is exorbitant in the extreme. They have it set up to be flashy night and day. All the buildings are made to be gorgeous, visible, and flashy -- one of the hotels, Mandeley Bay, is gold-colored all over the outside. Others are bright pink, or striped in curves of red and blue, or shaped like black basalt pyramids, or what have you. There are giant video screens all around, some belonging to specific hotels, some just generally advertising the Strip. There are fountains and gardens everywhere. Many of the hotel/casino/towers (the towers are the kings, here. I don't expect you to keep track of them, because I couldn't, but every time I toss out a name, envision a huge, thirty-story-or-so hotel, with a casino taking up the bottom floor or so, huge theaters for performances, surrounded by gardens and landscaping and themed scenery -- different themes for each one) have free shows every half hour or hour or so to anyone who wants to walk by them.
At night it's even better, or worse, depending on your perspective. You've all heard about the glittering Strip at night. It's bright as noon to walk down it, and they love to show off. Everything, and I mean everything, is lined in lights. Not just the towers, but even the McDonalds and the Walgreens are outlined in glittering, flashing lights. Some of the shows only start after dark. While we were there, we saw three -- a lights-and-music show at the fountains in front of the Bellagio, a pirates ship battle in front of Treasure Island, and an exploding volcano outside the Mirage.
Indoors is just as exorbitant as outdoors. The hotel rooms were nothing special (at least, they weren't at the Palace Station, where we were staying, but that was a smaller tower off the Strip that gave off a distinct air of wannabe) but the interior decorating was spacious, luxurious, and inviting. The food everywhere we went in the Strip ranged from good to excellent, and the alcohol was extremely free. Most of the casinos gave out free drinks -- beer, wine, coffee, water, apple juice, whatever you'd like if they have it. (You have to catch one of the waitresses, though, and it's hard.) Because it was Labor Day, things were overpriced, but still surprisingly affordable -- during the normal course of things, everything from food to drink to shows to hotel rooms are bordering on the cheap. It's quite possible to have a wonderful time in Vegas on surprisingly little money.
But the one thing you have to keep in mind during all of this, which Vegas does its level best to hide from you, is that the towers can afford to give you free shows and free alcohol and cheap rooms and cheap foods and six dollar amusement parks and video games and whatever else they have. They can afford it because of all the people that come into Vegas and lose their money gambling. So very, very much money pours into the casinos, with hundreds or thousands of individuals spending thousands, even millions of dollars per day in every hotel sets the funds for these glittering splendors. The slots machines offer fabulous payouts, hundreds or thousands or as much as half a million dollars or more, depending. But that's still only a drop in the bucket in how much they're taking in. And what they take in is what they take away from people.
I'm not, mind you, condemning it as a business. But one has to keep ones head, and it's hard to do among all the dazzle. I'd never seen anyone so totally seduced by the Megabucks mentality before I went to Vegas. Sera's parents (sorry, Sera, gonna talk about them for a while) were so into it it was scary. Her father, apparently, plays video poker with $100 bills at a time, and loses steadily, and just puts more in. The day we got there, when he ran out of money and had hit his ATM withdrawal limit, he asked Sera to take $300 out of her account so he could continue gambling, and that he'd pay her back with his winnings. Her mother said (frequently) that if she wasn't such a good gambler, winning steadily and then giving him the money she won, he'd lose all their money. Sera's mother was almost worse than her dad, in a way. She often repeated that it only took a quarter to win hundreds of thousands of dollars, that it was a smart investment, that you only lived once and should make the most of it, that you had to take chances to succeed in lifew, and that you'd never win that half million prize if you never played. Your parents are nice people, Sera, but when a pair of grown adults are encouraging their unemployed daughter to spend her college money in casinos, that's scary stuff.
For the most part I stayed away from the casinos and the slot machines, although I did play a few rounds of video blackjack (lost $10) and a few rounds of some strange nickel slots game (won $10.) Just personally, I actually had more fun watching the coins go round and round in that charity drop in Caeser's Forum Shops, but maybe that's just because I'm easily amused. That's ok, though, I'd be just as happy not to develop a taste for gambling.
Pina Coladas are a different matter.
Now, on to the specific events.
I went to Sera's house direct from work on Friday. Between traffic and closing, I didn't get there until 8 PM or so, but that was all right, since we weren't going to leave until midnight anyway. Aoi was there already. We sat around chatting and squeeing over girly stuff (Sera brought out a gift box she had of awesome makeup) and, of course, watching television, until Sera's dad came home and fussed us all out the door. It really was about 12:30 by the time we got going. He wanted to drive at night to avoid crowds (and sun,) which turned out to be a good plan. I'd heard the Vegas drive was 7 or 8 hours, but we got to Primm (right outside of Vegas) at half past four. Please note, for now and future, that it is not really feasible to sleep in the back of Sera's dad's car. There's no room, for one thing, the air circulation is unfortunate, he plays the radio fairly loud, and let's just say I see where Sera got her lane-changing technique from. Anyway.
We got to Primm at around 4:30 and decided to stop there for a while -- first for bathrooms, then stayed to gamble. Yes, right across the Nevada line, there's a grand glittering casino. Wannabe Vegas, a bit? Hmm. Aoi, Sera and I wandered off to get breakfast, and then ended up going to sleep in the car until the sun rose and made that impossible.
Did I mention that Vegas is very bright? It is.
We were woken after an hour or two of napping to drive the rest of the way into Vegas, although to be honest I dozed more on that drive than the entire trek beforehand. Here we get to the unfortunate part of the trip, where we turned up at the hotel at 7 AM, only to discover we couldn't check in until -- not even 11 AM, which we'd thought, but 3 PM. And at this point all of us (at least all three of us) were far too exhausted to contemplate doing anything but sleep. So, we essentially spend the next eight ours kipped out on the couches in the hotel lobby. And that lobby was FREEZING cold. At one point I was alternating between dozing on the cough, and going outside to doze on the bench because it was warm.
Ar arount 1:30, 2 PM, they finally did let us check in. So we dragged our bags up, had a brief squabble over how to fit five of us into two beds (the three of us squashed into one, although after that we got a rollaway) and then slept for several hours.
When we woke up, refreshed, it was time to hit the town. My memory of many of these events is somewhat confused and out of order, but I'll see what I can do. We ate dinner, then went out deciding to see some shows and head over to Gameworks. We did end up seeing the lights-and-fountains show at the Bellagio, then schlepped over to the GW. I wish now we hadn't, though. It was far -- we had to buy monorail passes, which was cool, although we didn't end up using all of them -- and by the time we got there, the grill was closed, and the place was actually fairly empty. It also wasn't terribly clean, either the arcade or the, ugh, bathrooms. There really weren't many good games, and of those that were there, two out of the three that I wanted to play were, in fact, broken. The big down of the evening, though, was that while I was there, somebody picked my pocket to the tune of over a hundred dollars.
Aaauugh.
Very fortunate that Sera and Aoi are such saints, and essentially paid for most of my food (and club cover) over the next few days, but that did scotch the chance of going to see one of the Cirque du Soleil shows while we were there. There were four running at the time. Mystere, which was just acrobatics and taiko drums. Ka, which actually had some kind of plot, on the order of a mysterious being that had been split into two pieces and went on a quest to find the other half of itself. O, which was their water show, and Zumanity, which was their late night adults only costumeless show. Hem. Sera wanted to see Ka, I wanted to see Mystere, Aoi wanted to see O, but I would have been happy to see any of them, really. If the tickets weren't $100 each. Sigh.The next day was our day designated for clubbing. I was interested in going to see Madam Tousad's (sp) waxworks, but it never really came to pass, alas. We also went to Circus Circus, the -- well, I'm sure you can guess the theme. We walked the midway, drooled over the free acrobat shows, played skeeball in the arcade (I myself played the Soul Calibur II they had there, and beat arcade mode with Kilik, ha!) and ended up with a confounding amount of small plush animals and a large plush Batman. Then we moved on into Adventure Dome, their indoor amusement park, where we spent the day quite happily riding roller coasters and bumper cars, though we never did get to the log flume ride. Then it was time to go back to the hotel and pretty ourselves up for clubbing.
Never really been clubbing before, don't think it's really my scene, although I could see the appeal. We settled on going to Area 54, on the grounds that it was free for women to get in (although cos of the holiday we ended up paying $10 each anyway.) We also stopped for a late (10PM) dinner before going on in, and discovered the wonders of peanut butter pie. Oh. Wow.
Yeah -- clubbing. The DJs were actually quite good, or so Sera judged. The music I agree was nice, although I don't really dance. There were Smirnoffs and Midori sours, and shirtless male dances, so
tbc
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 09:51 pm (UTC)Pssst... that club was Studio 54. And I think the peanut butter pie and shirtless male dancers were the highlights of the trip. XD!
Damn, I need to write my thingy about Vegas, too.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 09:09 pm (UTC)I love skeeball.
I hate pickpockets.