Las Vegas Trip, 3/4

The Flamingo

Flamingo puts its foot down

The second expedition was to see how the growing tip of the strip was getting on. I bought a monorail ticket and rode up and down it a couple of times to see where it went, which is from SLS (whatever that is, near the Stratosphere), to Westgate, the Convention Center, and then up the back alley behind the strip to MGM Grand. (It seems to go to fewer places than it used to, but maybe that’s just me.) Then I took it back to MGM and walked to Luxor and Mandalay Bay.

Mandalay Bay is now sadly famous for last year’s mass shooting incident and during the coverage of that I’d got the impression that it was in the middle of things. It’s not, it’s still right at the very end of the strip with nothing beyond it and nothing opposite it. I checked out some locations on the exterior for an upcoming fiction story, walked back towards Excalibur, realized there was an elevated railway, got on that back to Mandalay Bay and back again to Excalibur. (It’s quite a boring El, so this was even less exciting than it sounds.) There’s a little homeless city by the overpasses there, which I navigated to get back across the road and eventually to the Flamingo. Which was great; it’s an old-style casino with old-style attractions like a) giant flamingo statues b) flamingos c) a black swan d) feral showgirls hanging around outside in full feathers and e) a buffet.

Showgirls ignoring me because I aged out of the gullible customer age bracket

As far as I can tell, the feeding cycle of an escalator is to
eat a showgirl, hork up a pellet of feathers and then
shut down for 12 hours to digest

The escalators are called "thyssen" which is the Yorkshire
dialect word for "yourself", so these nameplates
doubled as a sort of friendly affirmation

Real life flamingos at the Flamingo

A black swan at the Flamingo

Speaking of buffets, the $10 days are long over. (Elan Sleazebaggano has changed his name to the less recognizably punterish Elan Sel'sabagno since then, and presumably does not hang out in casinos any longer.) I spent $43 on a brunch at Caesars Palace that was quite nice but I mean forty three dollars, and $23 (or something) at another one that was terrible. Bacon and eggs and muffins only, and they cleared my place when I got up for some seconds so I came back to find someone else sitting there. (She was very nice about it.) I did have a great meal at the Beijing Noodle Co. one evening and a very nice Thai meal at somewhere in a strip mall whose name escapes me.

Carp at the Flamingo, with tell-tale reflections

In other exciting escapades, I took a trip on the High Roller, a 550-foot tall observation wheel and took some photos of Treasure Island’s galleons for reference in the aforementioned fiction story. On the last day, we moved from Caesars to the Westgate, which used to be the Hilton, but seems to have had a troubled history since the Elvis days. Anything that’s more than a few feet away from the strip itself seems to have a hard time of it. Elvis himself was commemorated in a statue in the registration area, and in many photos about the hotel, as were other old timey Vegas champions.

Elvis in effigy

Gordon Ramsey is big in Vegas; his signpost appears to be
the Mad Cod's Amulet

Elvis in my hotel room

One other thing I noticed about the modern Vegas is the voices that tell you what to do – announcements, elevators, voice-overs, video recordings playing in the pods on the High Roller and so forth – are almost all young American males, rather than the soothing female slightly electronic tones you expect from your phone and airport walkways. There’s a hint of vocal fry. I think the reasoning behind it is that Vegas is really a very laddish (as the British say) town. It’s very much a drinking, sporting, gambling destination that attracts small gangs of young males. “Gangs” is probably the wrong word. “Bachelor parties of young males” may be a better collective noun. For such bachelors, the slightly submissive, domesticated Siri or Alexa would not be sufficiently hooky to engage their interest. The YouTube-star young male voices provide a much better come-on under the circumstances.

The High Roller

On the High Roller

View from the High Roller

Whee!

I didn’t find the trip as exciting as that first time more than 20 years ago, and some of it is because Vegas has changed and some of it because I’ve changed. It’s quite noticeable – the young men handing out flyers to nightclubs, invites to meet scantily-clad ladies and half-off (scam) tickets to performances neatly ignored me as if I wasn’t there, which I wasn’t, in their eyes, as the 18-40 demographic is pretty much all that counts. And they’re right, of course. I had no interest in blowing hundreds of dollars a night, and it was clearly obvious. Mind you, if they want me to spend more money, they could fix some of the escalators so I could get to the casino floors.

-*-

New York and the MGM lion

Rameses and some more ram-headed sphinxes at Luxor

Posts in this series:
http://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2018/01/las-vegas-trip-14.html
http://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2018/01/las-vegas-trip-24.html
http://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2018/01/las-vegas-trip-34.html
http://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2018/01/las-vegas-trip-44-more-pictures.html