Sixteen Volts

All right, we're back from our trip to Vegas, that Kunstlerian dystopia that was built by the combination of air conditioning and human greed. My only Internet connection over there was a couple of minutes on a pay terminal just to check my email, but other than that, I've been pretty much in the dark. Anything interesting happen out there while I was gone? Curiously enough, when I checked my SiteMeter stats, the fact that I haven't been writing here for five days doesn't seem to have had any significant effect on the visitor count.

At the Pearson airport in Toronto, we learned that USA is basically doing its immigration bureaucracy for the incoming flights at the country of origin. Which I guess makes sense, since otherwise every single airport in the USA would have to have customs and immigration and whatever homeland security they have there, and make everybody carry a passport walk through it even if they were Americans, since otherwise anybody could just stroll out the airport after arrival just like that. My first encounter with this system was very silly when every passenger had to fill out this form to proceed through the entrance, but on the table that had all these forms, not even one of the pens was functioning. I am starting to understand better why some Americans seem to hate their inefficient and bumbling government so much. Fortunately, as a Canadian citizen, the rest of the ordeal was actually quite light and tolerable: I had expected much worse.

During the flight over the Fruity Plains, I couldn't help but notice how flat the Flyover Country is. It is quite well organized, though, with a whole network of roads arranged in a regular grid. To amuse myself, I occasionally pointed out a small town below us and said to my wife that it must be Smallville, a joke that grew somewhat stale the fourth time or so. During the next leg after connection in Denver, the scenery below got a lot more interesting, looking like something out of Google Earth except that it was real. Unfortunately, it was already night by then so I couldn't enjoy the mountain scenery, and besides, there was heavy cloud cover anyway.

Suddenly, the mountains and clouds just sharply disappeared and there was simply flatness, with a few occasional specks of lights on the ground. When I saw a large concentration of these lights and something that were obviously big hotels far below us, I wondered why we seem to be flying past Vegas and aren't we supposed to be landing soon. The glittery town below later turned out be not Las Vegas at all, but Laughlin, a similar town that I had never even heard of before this trip. Anyway, pretty soon the plane descended towards Vegas, which was indeed quite an unreal sight at night, like "a game of Sim City gone horribly wrong" as Douglas Coupland once put it in one of his books. The plane flew around for a while before turning towards the final descend at McCarran, the local airport conveniently located right next to the Strip instead of being tens of miles away from the town like Denver seemed to be. As my wife noted, they have nothing but space in the Midwest. While the plane was descending towards Denver, it was interesting to look at all the McMansions going up far away from each other.

When we got there, McCarran was full of people and the taxi line was enormous, but fortunately the whole thing was well organized and the cabs just kept coming so that we didn't have to wait for long. Since we arrived at Friday night but were still full of energy and enthusiasm, we took a quick stroll for a few blocks around our hotel before going back to catch some Z's. We then spent the whole Saturday and Sunday exploring essentially the whole strip and seeing all the wonders that the big casino hotels had to offer.

It turned out that my mental image of the basic structure of Las Vegas and The Strip, based on what I had read about it before, had been almost completely wrong. I had expected the hotels to be located far away from each other so that there would be a strip of desert between them, but the Strip is actually densely packed just like a real city and easily walkable --- unless you are some obsese American who takes the car if the destination is over a block away, I guess. Heck, I routinely walk greater distances around here. Also there is no desert to be seen anywhere, other than the beautiful desert mountains that loom in the horizon basically in every direction. But you would actually have to drive pretty far past the endless sprawling suburbia to see actual desert, and even there I don't think that I saw even one sand dune, just rock. But I'll leave that topic to part 2 tomorrow when I'll write about our trip to the Grand Canyon, another interesting place that turned out to be rather different from my initial expectations. (For starters, the Grand Canyon is surrounded by perfectly normal forests instead of desert. Despite the name, apparently not all of Arizona is that arid.)

Now, of course Vegas might not be the most representative location of America, but I had expected the cultural differences between Canada and America to be a bit more noticeable. I was surprised to realize that not once during this trip did I have the experience of seeing something that would have made me go "Now I surely know that I am not in Canada any more". Other than some occasional American flags lazily waving somewhere, everything felt exactly the same as in Canada. Even the accent didn't really sound that different once you got used to it. I think that the biggest cultural shock that I got was at the Denver airport (an interesting place in its own right) with all the stores named all different and all those military people being shipped to Iraq. I feel so very old now, since all these soldiers looked like just kids to me, playing some kind of dress-up in their camouflage uniforms.

I was also a bit disappointed that during the trip, I didn't see even one person who looked like a mobster, a movie star, an aging stripper with huge fake tits, or any other stock character often depicted in fictionalized Vegas. Or perhaps I just wasn't strolling in the right locations. Also, the masses of bluehaired old ladies were completely missing, except in Harrah's, which seemed to be their favourite for some reason. Maybe that's the one they remember from their youth. Security was omnipresent but invisible, except that when we walked through Luxor Saturday morning, we saw four burly security guys dragging off an angry young yuppie-type male. But we didn't stick around to see if they used his head to open the door leading out of the hotel. And at least in one blackjack table I got to sit next to an old cowboy type who was chomping his cigar, but he didn't call me "pardner" even once.

Oh yeah, speaking of which, to my delight the fact that smoking is allowed everywhere in Vegas (man, has it been a while since I have seen a "smoking section" in a restaurant) didn't really bother me that much, since this filthy habit turned out to be surprisingly rare among the masses. That, and the fact that all casinos and other indoor spaces have pretty excellent air conditioning that sucks away the pungent smell of smoke. Maybe the chain smokers, the losers that they generally tend to be, frequented the numerous joints that were off the Strip, or perhaps they just stayed home in their trailer parks instead of taking trips to Vegas.

I had also expected Americans to be much fatter than us (one third of them being obese these days, as the alarming statistics tell us), but at least in Vegas this didn't seem to be so. I saw only two or three really fat people during the whole trip, and the fatties seemed to come out mostly in the evening. Perhaps the same explanation applies as with the smokers. If I visited some "real American" place, things might be different than in Vegas that was so sanitized of everything that I was actually surprised to hear some country & western song about being a redneck playing in a casino, or the Bellagio having a big American flag prominently displayed in front.

Those casinos on the Strip really are quite magnificient and something to see. I don't know how they can have such huge casino floors in buildings that don't look that huge on the outside, but I guess buildings always look smaller from the outside next to the whole world than they seem from the inside. To go anywhere in them, you pretty much have to go through the huge casino floor filled with slot machines and pits of card tables. Poker also seemed to be popular, with whole rooms full of tables of Texas Hold'Em full of players, just like on TV but packed tighter.

It was also interesting how all those hotels each had their own theme (or meta-theme) so that it was fun to walk along the Strip and see what the next hotel had to offer, every place different from the previous one. For example, the dancing fountains of Bellagio. The improved simulacra of Paris and New York pretty much eliminated the need for me to go see the real thing: Paris is much better without those annoying Frenchmen and New York is much better without all those smelly New Yorkers, and the same thing probably applies to the Venetian and Caesar's Palace too.

One expectation that turned out to be totally true about Vegas is the fact that there is no time in that place. During our visit, I honestly did not see even a single clock anywhere. Had I not had the time in my wrist, I would not have been able to tell what time it is. The themed hotels such as Paris and their simulated indoor "streets" and "sky" are lit so that it's always the right time of the day to buy stuff and gamble.

If you didn't feel like walking, you could just take the Monorail or the new, sleek and air-conditioned double-decker "The Deuce" public transit buses that drive back and forth the Strip. Five bucks gives you an unlimited day pass for the Las Vegas public transit, which is quite a deal. As a supporter of public transit, I was delighted to see this. I couldn't tell you how this public transit system works in the suburbia. During the busiest rush hours, I don't think that the cars could move along the Strip much faster than the pedestrians.

Vegas also wasn't quite as hot as I'd expected. Well, of course it is quite hot during the summer and I'd hate to think about it without air conditioning, but it's dry hot, and I didn't really sweat even during the outside walks. I had packed several shirts with me (at both Pearson and McCarran, it turned out to be quite smart not to have any check-in luggage but only carry-on, and with modern web check-in, you can just walk directly to security), expecting to sweat out one or two per day, but this didn't happen and I could just keep using the same favourite lucky shirt.

Vegas is famous for its buffets, and I think we ate in some buffet each day. While some were quite good (Aladdin and Spice Market), Luxor's buffet was a huge disappointment. Avoid it, anybody who is reading this and going there. We did also enjoy some non-buffet food, and the steak that I had at "Mon Ami Gabi" was the best I have had for a while. Say anything about those Frenchies, they sure know how to grill a steak. In the fast food sector, since we don't have Fatburger here in Canada but I had read good things about it, we decided to try it Friday the night we arrived since it was so conveniently at the part of the Strip that we were walking on, but their burger wasn't really that different from, say, Johnny Rockets. The fries were a lot better, though.

We also engaged in some gambling during the trip, first with video blackjack, then with the real thing. I lost maybe about two hundred bucks in total, but this was well within the budget, and I got the entertainment value out of it. In fact, I doubled up every single time that I played 50 cent or $1 video blackjack I won, except when I made the mistake of playing on a crappy machine that didn't even allow split and double down, kee-rist! The thing is, for the first two times that I played real live blackjack in a $10 table, I had an immediate losing streak to start with, and that wiped out my current cash reserves so I didn't even have enough time to have the cocktail waitress come bring me a drink. (It's really annoying when the dealer gets a blackjack three times in a row, especially if you also get good cards.)

Later, when I finally got to play $5 blackjack in MGM while my better half went to sit as a test audience member for some next season sitcom I started with 30 bucks, and this money lasted me a total of eight shuffles in a six-deck game before I was finally wiped out. And about third of that time I was playing alone. At the highest, I was sitting at about fifty bucks in chips, and the balance just kept moving back and forth between this high and the near-wipeouts. I was certainly surprised about beating the odds for so long, especially since it felt like I was getting 13's and 14's all the time while the other people were getting blackjacks and 11's to double down with. Of course, with the basic strategy card, the whole game is just a random walk isomorphic to a series of coin tosses that are slightly weighted for the house's favour, and the walk can go either way. It would be interesting to calculate the probability of this walk remaining within those bounds for that long: my guts say that it has to be quite small. Then again, my guts also strongly tell me that you should stand at 16 against a ten, which I always do against the basic strategy because I am such a coward. And I always lose. The blackjacks paid 3-to-2, so I used the accumulated single dollars and fifty cent tokens to tip off the dealer and the cocktail waitress. During this eight-shuffle run, the dealer (a veteran who looked like and behaved just like you'd expect a Vegas blackjack dealer to) took one break and was replaced by a Korean woman who I am pretty sure was stoned or something, since the contrast with her ineptitude and the previous dealer was so massive.

Now, you'd think that whatever people go in the town must also eventually come out (other than the 8,000 or so who reputedly permanently move in each month), so that when you leave the town, the airport would be as busy as it was when you came in. Our flight away from Vegas was direct to Toronto on Air Canada, and since McCarran is reputedly the ninth busiest airport in the world, we came in early just like the flight attendant in the second leg coming in had warned us to do. There are two terminals in McCarran, and of course we first went to the wrong terminal, and had to walk to the second one, which fortunately wasn't that far away, basically just around the corner. When we got in, the whole place was pretty much empty. There was an Air Canada check-in, but there was nobody there except one airline employee behind the desk. We kept walking further, thinking that we must be in some wrong part of the terminal and soon we'd come to a hall that would have lots of passengers scurrying about... but nope, that was it. Other than a few security guys and some maintenance workers, we were literally the only people in the whole terminal, as far as I could tell.

We checked in and walked through the security, where there were these dozen or so security people. They gave our carry-on a good-natured frisking and we asked them what the heck is going on and if it is always this slow here and if we are in Candid Camera or something. But here in the international terminal, there were only two flights listed in the departures board. Since there were no passengers coming in, all these security people were just sitting around and basically shooting shit with each other. I guess that most flights that come in and out of Vegas are within USA, and only Toronto and perhaps Vancouver and Mexico City would have direct international flights to Vegas. Since it was Tuesday night anyway, traffic might have been much lighter than, say, Sunday night, when pretty much every hotel that we walked past had a huge line of people waiting for a taxi to take them out. Something to remember for a possible trip in the future: for a one-week trip, both arrive and leave on a Wednesday?

If I remember anything else interesting about the trip, I'll write about it later. The trip to Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam is worth a whole separate post of its own, though, so I'll leave that as part two to be written tomorrow.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 at 1:02 PM