Las Vegas

Kevin's favourite capital of the week: Las Vegas the capital of gambling (and over consumption) in North America. I was surprised to find it is not the state capital of Nevada, Carson City is.

Of course, the reason I chose this was because we were there over the weekend. Below are some thoughts and a brief account of our trip.

Being seasoned travellers, the first thing we did upon arriving at the airport was to try and find public transportation. There is actually a public bus from the airport to the Las Vegas strip (Nancy, asking questions, found this out fairly quickly). We found this bus and a waiting representative from the Las Vegas transit authority, who told us about the service and where to get off for the Strip and how to get tickets for the Strip bus service, as the bus rolled along. Her friend got off the bus with us and we talked with her along the way down the Strip until she got on the next bus. She was originally from Alabama, which was where she was arriving back from. She had been living in Vegas for three years now. We never did find out what it was she did though. We did find out that there was not much in the way of work in Alabama.

We walked to the Jockey Club, our hotel, while taking in all of the sights and sounds of the Las Vegas strip for the first time in at least 15 years (for either of us). The atmosphere is something that is hard to forget, and we both remembered the throngs of people, the lights and the sounds fairly readily. The walk is something of a blur in my mind.

We avoided the slimy concierge and his “welcome gift” at the Jockey Club by claiming fatigue and fleeing to our room. We later ran into a couple who had taken them up on their gift (presented after a nhour sales pitch for a time share) and were fleeing as well. I mentioned that we had avoided it and we were applauded on our foresight.

“You're smart folk,” the man said while his wife nodded solemnly.

We saved a fair bit of money in Vegas by making use of Groupon; we were quite proud of this. Our first night we paid $20 for $40 worth of food and drink at French burger bistro in the Paris. Paid $45 for a two for one all you can eat and drink at the Spice Market in Planet Hollywood and got two massive frozen daiquiri type drink for $21. We generally stuffed ourselves at every meal too. It is time for some serious work out now that we are home.

We watched the free shows that we could, the Bellagio fountain, the Venetian Streetmosphere, and so on. Hung out in the Bamboo pool at the Cosmopolitan (connected to the Jockey Club) and rented a car to go to the Valley of Fire out in the desert (where 4000 year old Petroglyphs were carved into the stone by ancient Anasazi peoples). We only lost about $60 in gambling stuff. And we generally wandered and enjoyed the atmosphere. We even thought of a clever way to avoid sales people bothering us. Since they always started with a “where are you travelling from?” type question we began to answer “Sri Lanka”. This would usually stop them in their tracks as they tried to process this, while we made our escape.

While we enjoyed our time, there were two things we thought about, probably more than we should have.

One was noticing race. It was hard not to notice that all of the many people standing on the road trying to hand out cards for some strip club or something, every single one of them appeared to be Latino. The same could be said of the cleaning staff. There were certainly some richer Latino people staying at the hotels that we noticed as well, but they were a lot fewer. There did appear to be a fairly clear stratification of race in Vegas, with White people on the top (all of the sleazy sales people too) African Americans in the middle (there were a lot of younger waiters and waitresses anyway) and Latinos on the bottom. We did not really know what to think of it, except that it was hard not to notice. I wonder if its something we should notice, or even write about, I don't know...

One final thing on race (that didn't bother us): all of the people I mentioned us talking to were African American, the transit lady, her friend, the couple that we talked about the Jockey Club gift with. They were pretty much the only people we talked to in situations that neither of us would have been forced to talk each other or where the person or people talking to us was expecting a tip after our conversation. We just talked for the sake of talking (besides the transit lady, who was also giving us info on the city's bus system). Should it matter the race of the people that we talked to? It probably shouldn't, but at the same time it is hard not to notice. Given how sticky racial politics can be, I wonder if its even wise to mention. I don't know, I really don't. I could go on back and forth with myself about this, but that would be boring and counter productive most likely. This is just something we noticed and hopefully will not be taken with any extra meaning attached.

The other thing that put a damper on us was a question that sometimes popped into our heads: is this really sustainable? The answer seems to be unequivocally no, given how low the Colorado River now runs, the gigantic fall in the depth of Lake Mead (which we observed after our trip to the Valley of Fire; the whole lake seemed to have dropped in depth by about 20 feet judging by the evaporation line) and all of the power and water that the Las Vegas strip uses. I don't really feel like looking into it further, because I'm sure its far more complicated than that and I don't have the time right now; also its probably depressing. I hope its not as black and white as it appears.

 One hopeful sign for us was when we took a random turn on our way back to the city and found a large solar panel array that apparently powered part of North Las Vegas. It was nice to see at least some implication of green energy in action. The desert is no doubt a good place for it. Perhaps if there were less water use in Sin City itself there might be hope yet. You never know...