Notes from the Road - Day 26

2/24/04 9:45pm Las Vegas, NV

First thing today, I headed back to the Fremont Street Experience for breakfast, and ended up eating in a McDonald’s accessible only through a casino. I walked the ten blocks or so there and back from the hostel, the beginning of a long day on my feet. Fremont Street is lined with cheap motels, liquor and convenience stores, and XXX shops. One tattoo parlor I’ve noticed every time I’ve passed it always has a couple pigeons poking around inside its sign. In the window, there are pictures of the parlor’s work, and it’s good.

There are many professional quality pictures of staff and guests of the hostel hanging mounted on the walls of the break room here, the first time I’ve seen such quality. I wonder if they were a gift. This hostel is unusual in a couple of ways, including the fact that the building it’s in was a modern hotel at one point, complete with magnetic key cards.

When I got back from breakfast, I was so tired I went back to my room, read a little, then took a nap. While I was lying there, a procession of guys with plastic gloves came in for “housekeeping”. One cleaned the bathroom, another oiled the hinges of the door, which squealed horrendously every time it was opened, and another just seemed to be checking everything out. Around 12:30pm, I went ahead and got up, since there was a lot I wanted to see today and my window for seeing it all was pretty small.

My first stop was Caesar’s Palace, where I parked and walked right out, intending to head for the indoor rainstorm at the Aladdin. I just grabbed a piece of pizza in Caesar’s food court and didn’t take the time to really see the place because I knew I’d be coming back for my car. As I hit the street, however, I realized I was too late to catch the 2:00pm “show”, so I just crossed the road to the Flamingo. The first incarnation of this casino, on top of which the current Flamingo Casino was built, was Bugsy Siegel’s hotel, complete with his private room featuring bulletproof glass and four secret exits, but only one entrance. He was killed at his girlfriend’s mansion in California, where he hadn’t arranged any similar protection. In the courtyard area, where the pool, wedding chapel, and wildlife now are, there’s a plaque commemorating him.

The sunlight reflecting off the pink windows that cover the building gives everything a peach glow, and the abundance of birds and plant life in the open air gives it the feeling of a zoo habitat. This is only enhanced when the animal keeper comes out to feed the African penguins. She knows them all by name, and distinguishes them by the freckle-like black marks on their otherwise white underbellies. One of them was molting, that is, losing old feathers that had been replaced from underneath with new feathers. Right before this happens, they start gaining weight because their feathers aren’t waterproof during this process, meaning in the wild they couldn’t hunt for food. Unlike the flamingos, black swans, and the crowned swan also on-site, the penguins do not have hollow bones.

After losing another $10 of the $60 I made the other night, I headed for the Aladdin. The “indoor rainstorm” essentially consisted of turning on the equivalent of fire sprinklers in the ceiling above a small pool, the only difference being they used mist dispersal and far less water pressure. Most of the effect was achieved by really good sound effects coming through the speakers in the ceiling. This area is right in the middle of the walkway leading past shops and cafes, but only about thirty feet long. After it was over, I ran across some Jamaican acrobats performing the limbo, among other tricks the likes of which I saw last night at “Jubilee!”. One of them got under a bar no more than a foot above the ground, and the group of four wasn’t paid with anything but tips.

I was close enough to walk to the MGM, which I’d heard was really good, so I went in there and just barely caught a presentation featuring two of the male lions they display in a clear enclosed area. There were two trainers inside playing with them, and it was impressive. Apparently, they keep a sizable pride of lions on a preserve outside the city and rotate them in, two different ones every day, including cubs.

Next, I high-tailed it back to the other side of Caesar’s to Treasure Island, which was now a couple miles away, in order to catch the 6:00pm outdoor show of the “Sirens of TI.” I didn’t get to see it yesterday because of inclement weather. They must spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on the three, half-hour shows performed. There were a couple dozen actors, explosions, water sprays, and a moving, sinking, pirate ship. The actors lip-synched to cheesy lines and hip-hop songs, and hundreds of people crowded the sidewalk for an entire block to watch.

My feet were killing me, but I’d signed up for the 7:30pm bus from the hostel to Rio, and I made it back just in time. One of the hostel managers drove and happened to be from Melbourne, so I had something to talk with her about. The Mardi Gras (which is today) turned out to be an every day thing there, but it was still impressive. A stage rose up out of the floor with dancers and three “floats” suspended from the ceiling traveled a track around the room dispensing beads to those lining the balcony and in certain areas below. When it was over, we got back in the van, dropped off some of the guests on the Strip, made a liquor run to Albertson’s since the hostel was apparently running low on alcohol, then came back for an early night.

My feeling about Las Vegas, which means “the meadows” and was named for the vegetation surrounding the oasis the city eventually sprang up around, are pretty mixed despite the fun I’ve had here. It’s a metropolis in the desert whose only purpose is to legally fleece the tourists who pay for the privilege of escaping laws that exist in most other states and countries. It’s huge, and growing huger all the time. There are at least two new casinos under construction on the Strip right now. Las Vegas has no shame, and seeks to strip it away from those who do in order to get whatever it can from them. Yet it makes use of engineering and technological advances, with the money to invest in and promote whatever the new thing is, ensuring there will always be a place for the new thing as long as it’s entertaining. There is no imagination here whatsoever, but the ability to find the creative endeavors coming out of anywhere else in the world, and use them for its own purposes, which often as not coincide with the popular culture’s. In this way, it has the capacity to contribute to the society that likes to disdain its aberrant ways. I think the two probably need each other to continue to progress on the course they’re on. The question then becomes, is this course leading to a place we really want to go?