Woah. Vegas was loud. Im about fifty miles away on a greyhound bus and my ears are still ringing. It was basically 4 days of facing lights and titties with the occasional clatter of falling quarters.
I stayed in the Luxor, an egyptian themed hotel and casino which actually totally rocked. My room was in the pyramid itself which is one giant hollow building with the bedrooms located around the inner walls. I was on the 18th floor so not only could I look down into the insanity that was the casino but I could also have killed myself without even having to open any windows (which was lucky, since none of them actually opened).
(View from outside my room door. The sloping walls with lights are actually the walkways to the rooms. This photo was taken from one of them)
The strip is pretty bananas. the scale is just so unreal. From the wonderfully mismatched but woefully inaccurate street scenes of 'New York New York' to the ill considered but breathtakingly huge medieval ramparts of 'Excalibur' (which, frankly, would offer little to no protection from determined invaders), the place is a crammed with architecture as cumbersome and gigantic as this sentence. I suppose the common analogy is of a 'disneyland for grownups', the implication being that 'adultifying' disney just takes stripping down tinkerbell and swapping her sparkles for shame and desperation, but to me it was more like legoland; nothing had any sense of permanence. The turrets and tassels are all fiberglass or at best moulded concrete. Everywhere you look paint peels and plastic perishes - it must be a constant battle to keep the place shining the way it does. Nothing is quite real so that undersized doors and windows or a sphinx shaped car park make up a town built from a particularly eclectic lego collection. A little from the indiana jones set, a little from the star wars set, even a touch of duplo at the 'Tropicana'. Even the performances give the impression that backstage there is a ritalin starved child swapping on a new hairdo and set of legs with each costume change. Its not real and it wont last, but thats not really the point maybe.
I had fun anyway. I won nearly $20 on the slot machines, I swapped shirts with an inebriated birthday girl, I balked at the decadence and then spent $100 on dinner for myself, and i witnessed what must be millions of flashing lights without having a seizure. Now i'm hurtling down the 15 through the desolation of the Mojave national reserve and even though i'm hardly an hours drive away I feel a million miles form vegas.
Here are some slot machines some of you may enjoy. You know who you are...
No comments:
Post a Comment