2012/08/18: One night in Vegas

I’m not a friend of gambling. I’m also not a friend of wasting energy. Anyway: Las Vegas is somehow cool. The city has two parts which are relvant for tourists: “downtown” (it doesn’t look like a downtown at all), the city’s original core, and “The Strip” with its famous hotels. In between there are more than two miles of almost nothing, the only interesting buildings in this area are the wedding chapels with their “wedding windows”. I absolutely like downtown, where we started exploring the city and where we also booked a room in the wonderful Golden Gate Hotel (we didn’t sleep very long, but you don’t go to Vegas for having sleep). Highlight of downtown is the “Fremont Street Experience”, a roofed over street with twelve million LED nodules. Live music at three different stages, drunk people all over, almost naked women dancing on tables, a lot of fun and noise, everything quite cheap. It’s more than a gigantic egea congress, it’s more than a liberal Dubai – it’s Las Vegas. It’s great. Yes, The Loop. I have to write something about it… I actually didn’t really like it. The Loop itself is basically a huge parking lot with up to seven lanes per direction, where we spent some time in a bus, for which we paid 8$... Walking is faster than taking a bus during rush hour (which is 11pm to 2am), but it’s not comfortable at all: in order to make living in the city for cars as convenient as possible, pedestrians have to walk up and down stairs all the time, making detours and you have to refuse offers all the time. Yes, most hotels are beautiful (for example the Bellagio, known all over since “Ocean’s 11”). But some of them could also stand at airport XY somewhere on this planet. The replica of New York looks like polystyrene and cardbox if you have a closer look. The MGM Grand is just ugly. The monorail is a useless joke. Everything is about making money. But of course: it is unique, it is great. It is Las Vegas. Good that I’ve seen it. Even better that we stood downtown.