Monday, May 13, 2013

Las Vegas - BIG

It seems like a long time since I posted a blog. Here I am now, enjoying a few days with Andy in Las Vegas. He has been here several times, but I am visiting for the first time. I have always thought I wouldn't like it much here, but I am having a really good time. It is a very strange place. But being here with Andy is good, and we are having fun.

We are staying on "The Strip," a long road with hotels and shops all up and down each side. The hotels are gigantic, like no hotels anywhere else, and the are lots of them. We are staying in a medium-sized gigantic hotel that has 36 floors, each with at least 100 rooms I estimate. It could be more. Our gigantic wing on our gigantic floor has room numbers up to 100. The main floor has a casino and restaurants, so many that we have got lost already a couple of times looking for the elevator or the exit. Finding the exit is especially hard. The hotel is designed so you will spend lots of time eating, drinking, shopping and gambling in this one place. And all of the hotels seem to be like that. Andy and Iwalked into the one across the street to look around this morning and we got turned around in the winding corridors and discovered we were walking in the opposite direction from the one we intended, for at least 15 minutes, and we were still in the same hotel. We found a directory map with a "you are here" sticker. Luckily I read it carefully. It was mounted exactly opposite to reality, so left on the map was right in real life and vice versa.

Outside the road is gigantic. Mostly, you can cross the strip only on giant pedestrian overpasses that feed you back into another hotel. We found one street level crosswalk, and I counted the lanes. The strip has 8, except where it adds on turn lanes, then maybe it has 10 or 11. Each big hotel takes up at least a half off very long block on this gigantic street. Many take a whole block.

Some big things are nice. Our hotel has a lovely big pool. This is a very good thing because it is very hot outside. We have been enjoying the pool a lot. And our room is very spacious and lovely and elegant, with a big, comfy bed. When we look out our window, we can see a volcano, the canals of Venice, and the Eiffel Tower, but that's another blog post.

So you might ask, "Why do you like this place full of giant hotels?" I am not sure, but I do. Maybe I am impressed by the surreal excessiveness of it all. I am very curious about how it works, and would love to see behind the scenes. I would also like to know if there are really several thousand people staying in each gigantic hotel, or if they are mostly empty. Ours looks pretty well occupied, but there may be whole wings or floors that never see guests. I suspect nobody would tell me that. I will be looking and listening and blogging some more in the meantime.

Question: do you like Las Vegas?

Mompoet - curious about this strange gigantic place


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