Las Vegas is expensive. Don't let yourself be fooled by the low accommodation prices (we stayed at the Stratosphere for about $40/night). The main idea is to lure you in, and once you're there everything costs. A lot. I like to use an index that I call "The diet index" - how much you pay for a Diet Coke or a Diet Pepsi bottle at a vending machine. As I am addicted to these drinks this is an important index for me. In Las Vegas the average vending machine price was ~$2.50 for a 590ml bottle. That's about twice the price I pay at the university for the same bottle, and I think that the ratio of 2:1 is quite typical to Las Vegas. We ended up spending around a thousand dollars during the five days we stayed there, not including the flights and hotel room. And we actually spent less than the $100 we intended to spend on gambling, so most of the money was spent on food.
Las Vegas is disorienting. D already wrote about the way hotels are trying to disorient their visitors. However, there is more to it. Hotels, and lots in general, are just huge. I think that the lots are measured in squared kilometers (or their American equivalent) and not dunams. Hotels are built huge in order to be able to give it some theme, for example The Paris Las Vegas, The New York New York and The Venetian are all trying to imitate the look and atmosphere of their respective city. That goes both inside and outside. This imitation requires a lot of space and thought. Space is abundant as Las Vegas is practically built out of the desert, but it's not that simple. Since tourism is mainly concentrated at the Las Vegas Strip, which is a single boulevard, the best hotels compete for a central location ("Location, Location, Location").
The disorientation is not limited to the facades of the hotels. It's mainly inside the hotels. In an effort to block the outside world from the gamblers inside the casinos, there are no clocks and very few windows, thus the sense of time is lost. Add to that the constant bombardment of jingling sounds and dazzling lights and inside the casino from all the slot machines, and one can hardly process where one is or what was his or her intentions. The paths between slot machines form a grid that do not lead to or from any exit or entrance, again trying to create a maze where a person will get lost and start playing. Once you're seated at a card table or a slot machine, waitresses with minimal clothes will come to offer you free drinks, in order to keep you sitting. I wonder how come they don't connect people to mobile latrines.
Las Vegas is also the most liberal city I know in the USA. In this sense it even surpasses Tel Aviv. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and so is gambling (of course) and drinking outside. Almost all the grand hotels offer topless spectacles with some kind of a plot or another. On the strip there are trucks advertising escort services 24/7 (or at least at any hour that we happened to be outside). At every strip corner you can find several magazines with nude photos with the same services. I have to say that you can find that in Tel Aviv as well, but at least in Las Vegas it's legal. D and I have agreed that legalizing prostitution is beneficial to all parties involved, especially the women working in it. One has to accept certain facts about human nature, even if they are not nice, for example people will always want to drink alcohol or prostitution will never be gone. Legalizing prostitution will take crime lords out of this business, just like the Mafia lost ground when drinking was legalized after the Prohibition.
All in all, it was a long awaited vacation and I'm glad we took it. Now we are already back to work: D at her new internship and I teach a (yet another) new class.
Here are some photos that D took:
The Las Vegas Strip as seen at night:
Piazza San Marco - An indoors view at The Venetian:
Gondolas at the Central Canal, The Venetian indoors:
A night look of The Stratosphere, where we stayed:
My D standing inside a street of The Paris (indoors again):
This is a slightly exaggerated size of the actual daiquiris sold in Las Vegas. This one is from the indoors of The Miracle Mile shops, Planet Hollywood
The Paris outdoors:
This is a typical casino room at Las Vegas: a lot of noise and commotion. This one was taken at the New York, New York.
And this is how The New York, New York looks from the outside:
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