Las Vegas - The Sin City

When you are flanked by only sand around you for hours at length, it’s hard to imagine that a little further down in the middle of the desert lay one of the world’s most richest cities – a city that never sleeps. Las Vegas, billed as the Entertainment capital of the world is famous for massive and lavish casinos, the unrestricted availability of alcohol and adult entertainment which seems ubiquitous no matter where you turn in Vegas. Because of these reasons Las Vegas came to be more popularly known as the Sin City.

The city owes its current growth to the American mafia. The mafia gang lords first built the original casinos, which have now developed in to the posh and luxurious hotel cum gambling joints that Vegas is hugely famous for. The Las Vegas Strip is roughly 4.5 miles long. This strip of land is where all the action is - Caesar’s palace, Stratosphere, The Venetian, MGM Grand, Bellagio, Mirage, New York-New York, Casino Royale etc are a few of the mammoth hotels along the Las Vegas Strip. Some of them, with more than 2000 rooms were the largest hotels in the world at the time that they were built in the 1960s.

We spotted the circle of bright colorful lights that is Las Vegas Boulevard, from miles ahead in the middle of the desert. In the night it looked like an oasis of dancing golden liquid. When we were on the most famous 4.5 mile strip in the world we were swimming in a sea of lights – colorful, bright, psychedelic, disco lights of all shapes and splendidly blinding colors were blinking from every nook and corner. Las Vegas comes live at night like no other city in the world can, to the point that the only life in Las Vegas is night life. Incidentally she looks like any other city in the day time bursting with traffic in the rush hour.
After checking in to the hotel, we set out. Most parts of the state of Nevada is covered by desert and so stays fairly warm even when most of America is covered in snow. But it was unusually cold that evening with temperatures as low as 21 'F. It was the first time in about sixty years that the state of Nevada is experiencing such low temperatures. Imagine our luck! But it would take more than just low temperatures to dampen our spirits and we moved from casino to casino along the Strip enjoying the myriad pictures that each of them offered us.

All casinos are built on a theme. The MGM Grand, one of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas was bathed in green light and has a gambling floor where a full grown adult could easily lose his/her way among the various shopping joints, thousands of gambling machines, guests, waiters and artists moving about. It’s a Hollywood-themed hotel. It features five outdoor pools, rivers, and waterfalls that cover 6.6 acres, a 380,000 square foot convention center, the MGM Grand Arena, CBS Television City, and the Grand Spa. It also houses numerous shops and night clubs, 16 restaurants, two food courts, and the largest casino in Clark County, which occupies 171,500 square feet! In middle of the floor, it has a habitat for lions. Yes, live lions, two of them, a male and a female. The habitat is made of glass. Visitors are allowed to enter. The lions live right above the glass ceiling going about doing their thing- eating bones, drinking water- quite oblivious to people swarming to see click pictures of them.

The MGM Grand houses massive theatres where live shows are held. We were fortunate enough to catch a show by the greatest magician and illusionist of all time, the man who made the statue of liberty disappear in front of a live audience – David Copperfield. It was a spell binding live magic show. With his sheer brilliance, story-telling, well-timed humor and of course world-class magic that defies all reason, one is left with no choice but to believe that David Copperfield is not just a human but a wizard who can put Harry Potter and his kin to shame. He appeared from nowhere on the stage on a bike, made a car appear out of thin air, closed himself in a box big enough to fit a toddler, severed his feet from his body, made 13 people from the audience disappear and appear at the other end of the hall in a fraction of a second.

No I decided not to gamble. Well gambling is sin and me being a good girl, didn’t want to be a sinner. Ok the truth is that my luck is not very much in my favor when it comes to winning money, so I listened to my better judgment and decided not to lose money in gambling. Shows of Cirque de Soleil were running at many casinos. The posters were hanging everywhere. It would have been a real treat for all our senses and would have been worth the entire trip to catch one of them. But those shows were early in the evening and we didn’t reach until much later, so we missed them all.

The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino is the largest AAA Five-Diamond rated Resort in the Americas. This Venice-themed luxury hotel has 4,049 suites, more than 3000 hotel rooms and a 120,000 square foot casino! There was a wax model exhibition at The Venetian. I felt that The Venetian was the most beautiful of all the hotels. It had beautiful creamy white exteriors which were accentuated with brilliantly splendid lights that shone very delectably at night. Well, if you spend $1.5 billion in building a hotel, it ought to show!

Proudly using the slogan, "The Greatest City in Las Vegas", the casino New York – New York is themed on New York City. It’s architecture is based on a mini model of the New York City skyline including the Empire State Building, Chrysler building and a rollercoaster modeled on the Six Flags. The roller coaster named as the Manhattan Express, travels through the hotel’s interior as well as exterior and has cars painted to resemble the traditional Checker cab. The hotel includes several towers configured to resemble New York City skyscrapers. In the front is a pool representing New York Harbor, with a 150 ft tall (half-scale) replica of the Statue of Liberty, the roller coaster, and replicas of the Brooklyn Bridge, Soldiers and Sailors Monument, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Ellis Island, and Grand Central Terminal, among other well-known structures. Inside, gambling areas, bars, food courts and meeting rooms are named after New York City neighborhoods or landmarks. The main casino area is named after Central Park, while the "Village Eateries" food court is modeled after New York City's Greenwich Village. It even includes real menus from New York Chinese restaurants.

The casino Paris had an 540 foot tall replica of Eiffel Tower(half the size of the original) pitched on the front, a neon sign in the shape of the Montgolfier balloon, a two-thirds size Arc de Triomphe and a replica of La Fontaine des Mers. The front facade of the building suggests the Paris Opera House and the Louvre.

Bellagio- the casino that was looted in Ocean’s Eleven - is a AAA Five-Diamond rated luxury hotel and casino. Themed on the famous resort Lake Como in Bellagio, Italy, the casino Bellagio is much famed for its elegance. The front of Bellagio is adorned by an 8 acre artificial lake, which houses the Fountains of Bellagio, a large dancing water fountain synchronized to music that puts up a dancing fountain show every half an hour.

A smiling Cesar stands in front of a Shakespearean Cesar’s Palace. Caesars is a luxury hotel and casino with more than 3000 rooms in five towers - Augustus, Centurion, Roman, Palace, and Forum. The guest suites in the Forum tower span an area of 1000 sq ft.
The sheer splendor, grandeur and posh setting of the casinos smack not just of money but vulgarly filthy amounts of it. Come to think of it, sometimes such indecent display of money and the luxury that it can buy makes one cringe and explains the American arrogance that is clearly an offshoot of the massive wealth and money power.

We dined at an Indian restaurant and caught the Las Vegas monorail back to the hotel. The monorail picked us up from The Venetian and dropped us off at the MGM Grand. It was 4.00 AM when we hit the bed. There were many more casinos to cover, but they were much smaller ones and we had had a look at all the biggest and the best ones in the Strip. Though we did a little more exploring in the morning, the sight-seeing that we did at night was the best and covered almost all of the Sin City. We left Vegas at late noon the next day, thus bringing our 10-day trip to a grand closure.