Las Vegas Pt I – Is Anything Real?

My parents came over to the US for my 30^th birthday. As part of these spectacular celebrations I figured we may as well go down to Las Vegas. What could be more appropriate than celebrating the last gasp of your irresponsible 20’s in the town that has the motto “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. It is a 5 hour flight from New York to Las Vegas – and unfortunately it was also an economy class flight all the way there. It has been some time since I have had to suffer through flying in the crappy end of an aircraft – let alone the fact that I have managed to score some flights on the company jet which makes even first class seem passé. The other thing about flying into Las Vegas is that you are coming in over the desert – lots of strong thermals and mountains to make for a real interesting turbulence factor. I can assure you that there were times on our approach to the runway that I was wondering whether the pilot was having flashbacks to his time in Vietnam and was throwing the aircraft around the sky to dodge incoming flak and surface-to-air missiles. But we got down onto the deck in one piece – any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

And yes – it is true – you can use pokies in the Las Vegas airport. I have uploaded one picture in particular for you. Yes, you are seeing correctly – a Star Wars slot machine. I suppose it makes as much sense as the good old Queen of the Nile back in Sydney. The really creepy one though was the Alien Slot Machine – one hopes that the jackpot wasn’t a facehugger launching at you.

Impressions of Las Vegas? First and foremost – nothing in Las Vegas is real. The casinos are expanding like the megacities in all those William Gibson novels – the majority of them are linked together through a series of tunnels and outbuildings. The Casinos themselves are usually based on a theme, some highlights being;

- Aladdin, a Middle East theme without the suicide bombers
- Paris, Paris without smelly student protestors & has a quarter size Eiffel Tower
- New York, NY without the steam pipe explosions
- Excalibur, an authentic King Arthur castle with 4,000 rooms, a moat & a fiberglass keep
- Luxor, a Glass Pyramid with a beam of light coming from the top that can be seen from space
- The Venetian, Venice without the stinky canal factor

As you can tell, subtlety is obviously the overarching motto of Las Vegas! One of the more surreal moments was actually at the Mandalay Bay hotel which has a ‘bit’ of a beach theme – 3 enormous wave pools. We went to what was one of the more impressive Aquariums I have ever seen – sitting 5 metres underwater looking at Sharks, Barracuda and all kinds of aquatic life whilst surrounded by a desert and being several hundred miles from the nearest ocean.

Needless to say that if you were an engineer in this town you would have a marvelous old time building the sort of things that used to be built by the more eccentric branch of the British Royal Family. Of course everything is made out of steel frames and what appears to be fiberglass or chipboard. This results in an insane urge to reach out and touch everything – I imagine that the closest you can get to this experience outside of Las Vegas is on a movie set in LA. You have this constant sense if you just peek around the next corner you will see the back of the building being held up by frames without an interior.

What supports this excess? Well consider the following stats for 2006,
- Number of visitors: 38,914,889
- Visitor Contribution: US$39,419,205,580
- Hotel Rooms: 132,605
- Government Gaming Revenue: US$10,643,206,000

So you can imagine that the great state of Nevada quite likes’ the gambling! They also like the boxing! In what was to become a bit of a recurrent theme for my parents visit, we just happened to pick a weekend in which a massive event was taking place. A boxing match. To give you an idea as to how big this event was – approx. 400 private jets had flown in for the weekend. So many that they were having trouble parking them all at the airport. Ringside seats that had originally sold for $10,000 were being sold by scalpers for $30,000.

On the next installment of Las Vegas – The Liberace Museum! (C’mon – we all know there was no way in hell that I was going to go ‘Vegas and not stop in at this place…)

Weird Stuff in NY: How Much of a Pervert Are You?

Wandering around NY you come across all kinds of weird things - I fully intend these weird things to be a common feature of this blog. So today I wandered down the road to Battery Park and took a picture of a sculpture that is in the park. A sculpture that I think enables us all to gauge just how much of a 'prevert' (to quote Stanley Kubrick) we all are. What is the first thought that enters your mind when you see the image to your right?

If you were thinking of a different part of the human anatomy than 'eyeballs' you are a filthy pervert who shouldn't be allowed to look at art. I have been given to understand that they actually rotated the right errr... eyeball so that it was looking in a different direction than the left one in an attempt to minimise the number of children asking the awkward "Mummy - what are those?" questions. That or the artist comes from the deep south where that particular alignment of eyeballs is more common than we would like to think.

Where the hell do I live again?

So - after 6 months of living like a nomad - albeit of the 5 star hotel kind - I finally landed for real in New York last December. After spending a month living uptown on 50th & 8th in a company apartment, I finally obtained the nirvana that is my own apartment. After 6 months I can assure you I was cartwheeling down the corridor. Well, actually, mentally I was cartwheeling down the corridor. Trust me - in my place you don't have that much space for such physical exertions!

So - I figured that I would try to give y'all and understanding as to where it is that I actually live. I am way downtown - in fact you can only go abou 500 metres further downtown. The picture above shows the southern tip of Manhattan. The blue arrow is the World Trade Centre site, the yellow arrow is my apartment building. I am on the 9th floor out of 28 - with just on 500 apartments in the entire building. It is pretty handy to the office - I have to walk all of 100 metres from the front door of my building to the front door of the office. We also have 24 hour doormen, a valet and dry cleaning service and a massive gym. Which disturbingly enough I am starting to use.

It is amazing how quicky I have adapted to the NY way of life - tiny, tiny apartment with the ability to have anything delivered within about 5 minutes. Within a 200 metre radius of my place there are 4 bottle shops that deliver. Not to mention directly opposite my apartment is a deli that is open 24hours a day just in case you need to duck out at 3 in the morning and get some more milk!

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to be fairly active on here - trying to get a feel for what you can put on this thing and how - but hopefully I can give regular updates of the plain weird stuff you get to see in this city. What kind of weird? The other day I got on a subway train and there was a guy in a 3 piece business suit (delightful shirt and tie combination by the way) holding a leather attache case in one hand and a kayak paddle in the other hand. And that is probably one of the less surreal things that I have seen in the last few months.

Work is its usual hectic mess - am spending about 1 week a month up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A delightful little seaside town - just not NY - and lets face it, if you do have to live in America NY is the place to be! You get to blend in with the rest of the weirdos...

What was that phrase - oh yeah - Let There Be Light... or something

So - after a dedicated 6 year absence from the internet it would appear that I am being sucked into the world of blogs... as always - more to come...