Las Vegas

I risk dating myself here but I’ll say it anyway: the last time I visited Las Vegas before this trip was in the early 90s.   I didn’t like it then, but it provided a certain amount of fun and entertainment and it was cheap, which then , traveling on a tight student’s budget was worth something in and by itself.

This place ain’t for me. Pic: discoverthetrip.com

This time I absolutely hated the place and couldn’t wait to get out.  I know I am in the minority on this one, vastly outnumbered by people who love Vegas and everything about it.  But, seriously, what is there about it?

What bothered me most the first time around (just like in Disneyland, btw) is the fakeness of it all.  This is probably my German side – forever seeking for authenticity – that is so strongly reacting to fake Eiffel Towers, fake Venetian canals, fake Statues of Liberty, fake everything.  I remember about 10 years later – I was by then living in California – a colleague of mine taking a long weekend trip to Vegas where she staid at the Venetian coming back to work and marveling about Vegas in general and the hotel in particular “just like Venice, only cleaner” were her words.  The words of somebody, I might add, who had never set foot into Europe.  One thing is true, the streets in Venice are dirtier than the halls of the hotel, but they are streets, not hallways kept spotless by an army of underpaid mostly Mexican cleaners.  But anyway, that was then.

This time I was prepared for the fakeness and willing to try to just go with the flow and enjoy it.  But this time the problem was a different one, it was what Umberto Eco describes in his Travels through Hyperreality so very aptly with the words “behind the facades lurks a sales pitch”.  And that is exactly it, Vegas has become a expensive make-believe luxury destination for those who can’t afford the real thing and unlike before one pays dearly for that illusion.  With the exception of parking and the spectacles some casinos put up, e.g. a fake volcano eruption every half hour starting at 5 pm,  everything in Vegas is expensive and wherever you turn somebody wants to sell you something.  Now maybe there are still cheap lunch buffets in parts of town where one doesn’t want to be, serving food that one does not care to eat, but at our Hotel at the Strip we spent almost $70 for a three Pho soup lunch with tea and a soda – I can get this in Silicon Valley for $25.  The da Vinci exhibition at a hotel was $52 for the three of us – that was after we used a 40% off coupon – and it was okay, not great.  What irked me was that they were trying to upsell us on some cheesy picture of us taken in front of a green wall with brushes in our hand that came out looking like we were painting the Last Supper.   I mean, seriously …

The other thing that disturbed me was the vengeance with which the hordes of people embraced this whole spectacle of conspicuous over-consumption.  Huge alcoholic drinks in silly shaped plastic containers where hauled around on the street (and not just by 21 year olds – that I would understand but by people in their 40s and 50s), as well as  shopping bags (do other cities not have the usual array of clothing stores?), people dressed up (or tried to) walking around in the silliest combinations and I have seen more than a reasonable share of naked legs in sandals at around 0 to 5 degrees Celsius – with other words: freezing temperatures.  I think we were the only people on new Years Eve not wearing a 2013 tiara, other head gear, glasses, necklaces, whatever.  Everything is about consuming more and more, everything needs to be bigger, everybody seems to want to outclass the rest, live the high life, be fake-rich and show it off.

Okay, I am am done now.  I won’t go back if I can at all avoid it.  Maybe somebody who has been to Vegas and liked it can try and explain to me what you see in it.  I can’t wrap my mind around it.