Sensational... Sin City

People in England may well be complaining, as our grey and cloudy country slips over into the third week of heatwave, but let me tell you: Vegas was hot. Oppressive hot. The kind of hot that comes from concrete and glass and tarmac. When we got off the bus- an eight hour journey as city gave way to rocks and shrubs and huge expanses of nothing- the road shimmered, warping in front of our faces. Every time we took a breath in, we could feel the heat on the inside of our lungs. The middle of the desert, and there was no wind.

You can’t really roadtrip without passing through Vegas, and with the international branding of Sin City, the place where anything goes,  you’d expect  it could never live up to the hype. But of course, this is America, hype means a different thing there. It was an acid-trippy adult fantasyland that begins with the mirage-like effect of seeing the vast pyramid and sphinx of the Luxor looming out of the blank desert, and then one by one the eclectic mashup of the strip that you’ve seen countless times on postcards. This was to be the grand finale of our trip: and while we never woke up with a tiger in the bathroom, it was one hell of an experience. 

terrifying clown

There's a lot that's weird and wonderful about Sin City, but the most beautiful fact is that once you get there (make it past the flights or the coaches, or whatever the bulk prices are) your stay can be insanely cheap. It’s just about finding the right places. We stayed four nights in the lurid Circus Circus casino, advertised from the front by a terrifying neon clown, who stood brandishing a glowing lollipop at the cars and buses cruising down the strip. For $25 the first two nights and a slight increase over the weekend we got a room with a hugely comfy king-sized bed, desk, armchairs, bathroom, fridge and tv. Each casino-resort is so vast there are always rooms going, and hotels slugging it out for who can bring in the most customers, so if you do a bit of research before booking you can often land an awesome accommodation deal. 

Once you're settled, sort out your transport. The strip is incredible to see, but it’s also vast, and in the heat, difficult to navigate. If you come to Vegas without a car, then before you do anything else, buy a three or a six-day bus pass for the ‘Deuce’. The buses are regular, incredibly well airconditioned, and an invaluable way of getting up and down the strip. Don’t think you can save yourself by walking. We tried that on the first night, and The Graduate nearly collapsed in the foyer of the Palazzo. You'll also miss out on some of the colourful characters who ride the Deuce. Why walk, when in a single short bus trip we not only saw a dishevelled drunkard lying across the seats shouting about how he was secretly an undercover cop; but a guy wired out of his skull- who rolled up to the back seats yelling 'WHO WANTS A GRAM? VEGAS, BABY!', slipped a packet of the white stuff to the incoherent 'undercover cop', and then collapsed next to us for a chat about England's best football teams.
 "Manchester United," he insisted, touching The Graduate's thigh. "That's the stuff." 

fun loving free thinkers....

I do think you have to be over 21 to enjoy Sin City. It was only after arriving we realized we were staying in a ‘Family hotel’, and even then I was truly baffled by the number of kids running around. The casinos were full of smoke and drunk adults, and beyond the initial amazement of the huge buildings I couldn't much see the appeal for younglings, or for the parents who have to shepherd them past the ‘over 21’ zones and back to the screamingly loud amusement arcades. It helps as well to enjoy some of the colorful entertainment on offer. On our second day we were approached in the street by a large florid man, who shouted "You look like a very happy young couple!" and then invited us to a very exclusive adults party at a club called The Jockstrap. "It's for fun-loving free thinkers." he said, earnestly. It was to his infinite regret that we told him we didn't qualify, not being over twenty-five: or married. 

"Did we just get invited to a sex club?" I mumbled as we walked away. 

"Yup." The Graduate nodded, giving me a discreet high five. 

After going on to get lost in Ceaser’s Palace and nearly contracting a second bout of heatstroke, we decided to take a bus downtown to explore the Vegas off the main strip; and accidentally discovered a magical place outside the Vegas of Hollywood. A ten minute bus ride off the main strip takes you into the grittier end of Vegas, the vintage strip set up and run for many years by the mob. Once the main Vegas Strip, this area has become fully pedestrianized and titled The Freemont Street Experience: half a kilometer of sidewalk under the biggest LED screen in the world.  Here the casinos are a shade grimier, a shade tattier, about a quarter of the size, but with a hell of  a lot more character. The Golden Nugget, with its flume through a shark tank; the Four Queens; the Main Street Station with its railcar buffet. The slots are cheap and the drinks are many.

Freemont Street Experience

99 cents? Yes please.

These casinos are full of 'secret' deals. Inside the Freemont is a bar and grill called Tony Romas, where after 9pm you can get a fantastic steak and lobster for only 11 dollars; head along to the Main Street Station and they’ll do you a frozen margharita for just 99 cents- the best way to get rid of your slot machine fodder. At Binion’s you can get a free photo of yourself taken with a million dollars, piled high in a pyramid, New Orleans themed casino La Bayou will give you strings of Mardi Gras beads whenever you come in to play a slot. International sensation the Heart Attack Grill has been 'fighting obesity since 2005' with its Quadruple Bypass Burger.








It's more manageable than the main strip and packed with free open-air concerts, fantastic hidden gems of bars and drinking joints. On our last, truly memorable evening, we saw ‘Marriage can be Murder’ at The D: a hilarious dinner-and-a-show murder mystery with heavy audience participation; puns strong enough to kill a horse, and slightly racist undertones (when the only Asian member of the audience stood up to speak the DJ drowned him out with a sample of Gangnam Style). Once finished we wandered our way into a biker bar called Hogs and Heifers; where fierce girls in jeans and fringed tube tops danced on the bartops and screamed themselves hoarse at the customers. It was a weird form of customer service: as a new party of people stepped tentatively over the threshold one particularly dangerous bargirl howled "THIS ISN'T A [expletive] COCKTAIL BAR SO IF YOU [expletives] WANT A DRINK I SUGGEST YOU WALK YOUR [expletives] UP TO THE BAR AND ORDER ONE!" before leaping back onto the bartop and high-kicking her way back towards the ale taps. 

Not sure it's one I'll be trying when I return to my waitressing job, but it seemed to work for them. 

I know the main strip is what you see in the films, but Downtown had so much fire and fizz that The Graduate and I spent most of our time exploring it. So sure, get your photos taken of the classic strip casinos, ride the rollercoaster around New York New York and splash out at the Ceasar's buffet- but then head down to the mob part of town. I think Sin City, whether you end up loving it or hating it, is something that you have to do once in your life: though I’ll reiterate that waiting until you’re twenty-one is more likely to land you the full drinking gambling playing experience. But there’s no age cap on standing outside the Bellagio hotel at midnight, as the star spangled banner plays and huge white sprays of water flying thirty feet into the air, and if you can put the hole in the ozone out of your mind, there's something truly magical about the sight of all that neon. 

Sin City. I sincerely hope it's not the last time I visit. 

Not the Vegas Blog

I know, firstly that I haven’t blogged for too long. Secondly, I know that what I’m supposed to write about, and what I suspect people want to hear about, is what I got up to in Vegas. Why wouldn't they? I got invited to an adult club night for ‘free-thinking couples’ for one thing, and that’s just a small fragment of a really mad four days. I’ll get to it, I promise.

The tenacious puppy

But right now I just want to write a bit about the fact that I’m now home again, and I've been out of Berkeley for almost a month, and thinking about that has put all sorts of things in my head; and for the moment writing about Vegas will only remind me that I’m no longer in Vegas, and no-one needs that.

So, I’m at home. And home for me right now involves a never-ending battle of wills with a ten-week old Portuguese water dog. I just spent ten minutes sitting in the kitchen eyeballing him through the back windows as he stood at the top of the garden steps he is too small to climb down, staunchly refusing to sit and thereby allow himself to be lifted.  

After an eventual capitulation I got him inside, wrote the first three sentences of this blog and then had to get up again and forcibly pry one of my father’s summer clogs from his deceptively tiny jaws.

He’s a tenacious little bear, and is not quite housetrained, which means that most of my time in England so far has involved sitting in the kitchen waiting for him to perform his next bodily function inbetween bouts of harassing our intensely world-weary Labradoodle. He is also agoraphobic, and has firmly decided the best place for him to sleep is in the wedge between the bottom of our oven and the floor, where he can quietly chew the flex cable and eat the paint as it strips away under the pressure. But goddammnit, he is a cutie.

Since coming home I went up to my old university to give a talk about blogging, for which I felt vastly unequipped, but everyone was lovely and generous, and I particularly enjoyed the question from the young man who asked whether blogspot was owned by Google; because if it was there was no way he was setting up an account there. Ain’t no way the USA surveillance was getting to him.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but everyone in California is really friendly.”

Somehow not the answer he was looking for.

I miss the friendliness and the happiness more than I could ever have imagined. Even with this wholly unusual heatwave putting some semblance of a smile on everyone’s face, I have never found the London Underground more isolating. Yes, the BART was expensive and slow, and apparently has been completely dysfunctional since I left, but you could always count on at least two entertaining personas on the ride across the bay. People would at least make eye contact, occasionally, instead of sitting in bubbles of festering resentment against everyone else trying to get to work.

I miss feeling productive, having an agenda. Sure it’s the summer holidays and that’s bound to go tits up, but given that my only employment is Puppywatch, at least until I can move back up to Norwich, I’m not surprised that my brain is going soft.

As someone who is only just getting into the ‘not going back’ mourning period, all I can say is that reverse culture shock just expresses itself in strange ways. I sat up way into the night last night watching promotional videos of the Berkeley campus and crying in a deeply self-indulgent manner; and I creeped out a guy on the train last week because he was wearing a San Francisco Giants cap, so I stared at him, glassy-eyed all the way to London Bridge station. I find it hard to write about America- a first attempt at a piece of dissertation writing last week became inexorably tangled in the Golden Gate Bridge suicides- and I get angry with myself, on a regular basis, for every incidence over the past year when I wished myself home again.

It’ll pass. I had much the same experience when I landed back from Ghana, and got over that without too much grief; so I’m sure that in due time I’ll publish something entertaining about that Vegas sex party invitation and the back-of-the-bus coke dealer who wanted to talk to me about Man United. For now though, I’m just going to rescue that tea towel from the puppy, and watch the Bear Territory video one more time.