Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas!

15-16-17/06/2013

It is not an everyday thing to see human absurdity at its best and yet here it is, announced as:”Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas!”  Which person, smart enough to know that 1+1 equals 2, would idea building in the middle of a ‘dry, hot, dusty, far away from everything’-desert a place that has to attract people.  Or maybe just because this person knows how to sum that Las Vegas exists.  Far away from everything with the desert isolating the city, is it the perfect trap: you are thirsty and hungry, you will spend money there…  A glorious brise lifts you up where you belong: at the stratosphere of the human layers.  Welt and happiness is your future, you become instantly famous as every card dealer treats you as VIP, and bit by bit you get trapped by the American dream: spin the wheel and become the richest man in the universe!!!

Each casino has its own way of hunting their share of your wallet.  Treasure Island with immense open air shows where a full sized pirate ship crewed by half naked gogo’s  brings down the Chippendale ‘bad’ ship.  Bellagio with astonishing fountains dancing on music that fills up a enormous lake by the entrance of the hotel every ten minutes.  New York-New York, a building made in the exact shape of the skyline of this city where a roller-coaster comes out of the casino, goes around the hotel passing by Lady Liberty.

  

Or how about the Venetian with a water channel on the hotels 2^nd floor, where people can make a ride in a Gondola under the blue marvelous painted sky, passing the many bridges that simulate the streets of the north Italian city.  And there is so much more, Caesars Palace the biggest of all where someone would enter, been seen for the last time at the Coliseum… and is never of heard again… lost in the endless labyrinth of poker table galleries and slot machines halls. Luxor’s pyramid with giant sfinks guarding the entrance, Paris Casino with its 1:2 scale Eiffel tower and Arc du Triumph and we can go on and on…

   

Each big casino has a Cirque Du Soleil show going on, there are 60 lanes bowling halls, pop-art wedding chapels, concerts, theater, and musicals…all top level.  Bars and restaurants of famous cooks such as Gordon Ramsey or Mario Batali…

     

But nothing is perfect and Las Vegas has a very dark side in the same range of excess as its bright side… There are men winning 1000’s of dollars and still look bored as happiness is sucked out of them after all those years, you see  excitement around dice tables where people lose their live savings, older women loosing dignity by every push on a machine that’s “hot” but doesn’t warm or consulate their lonely cold hart.  They would win with a full house and be the man of the moment but early on the morning arriving at their empty home…

Las Vegas has it all!!! And you are the money you have…or pretend to have.

And then there is the Hoover Dam, the one and only that makes the dream comes true.  A massive construction that blocks the Colorado River, absorbed 2 years of its caudal and flooded the land behind this immense wall.  Creating a lake of unbelievable proportions:  640 square kilometers, a 35,2 cubic kilometers of locked in water that produce about 2000 megawatt of clean energy!!! The first time I ever read about this manmade-wonder was in Jeremy Clarkson’s book: “I know you got soul!” wherein he writes about the machines that he believes have ‘soul’. Here is the link to the article: I know you got soul