August 24, 2003

No trip to Nevada is complete without a trip to New York. It kind of rounded off our round-the-world-in-three-days trip. And again, although it was movie-set-fake, it was pretty convincing. Outside, if you isolated small parts of the scenery, it made sense. But when you put the whole thing together it became confusing. If you click here you’ll see what I mean.


When inside, you find lots of slot machines, and away from this a restaurant and café area in the style of Brooklyn and Greenwich Village. Underneath your feet is concrete, and fire escapes adorn the ‘fronts’ of the ‘buildings’. After I’d been in it a while my subconscious was being fooled – when I saw somebody rolling their suitcase down the ‘street’, holding their suit carrier, I wondered why they were outside. And then it clicked that of course they were inside, and they’d just stepped out of a lift from the hotel room tower. I can imagine that if you stay in one casino all weekend, and don’t step outside, how you can lose track of time and place. (Although when they created dusk at the Venetian yesterday, by switching off the lights at 6pm exactly, it was kind of obvious!) Presumably the disorientation is exactly what the casinos are trying to do – when I went into the Hard Rock Hotel/Casino yesterday morning to find the Starbucks, there were plenty of people at the tables and slot machines at 9.15 in the morning (and propping up the bar).

Anyway, after New York New York, we also saw Excalibur - a medieval ‘English’ castle which appeared to be modelled on an England I’ve never seen. Perhaps they did their research by going to Disneyland and reading ‘1066 and all that’. We also went to Tropicana, for a free 15 minute acrobatic display, which in true Vegas style was performed on top of the slot machines in the main casino, and we also ‘won’ a free deck of cards. This was also our big gamble, when we put our $1 each into the Wheel of Fortune. Sadly we lost our $ quickly, with no exciting lights or clattering coin sounds.

In the evening we’d planned to go to the Stardust casino for the $11 Steak and Lobster meal (okay, it wouldn’t be quality, but it would be steak and lobster for £6.80, and probably better than you’d get in England for three times the price). But instead, we found tickets for the Michael Flatteley dance show at half-price (about $40 each), which Charlotte and Sarah really wanted to see, so I dropped them there for the 8 o’clock show, and took a complaining Emily back to the hotel, via ‘Long John Silver’s Shrimp Shoppe’ Drive Thru (21 crispy shrimps, Coke and fries for $3 – how could a guy and gal resist).

Yep, Vegas sure is weird, but somehow it’s got a kind of charm ;-)