Paco´s Life: Madrid

California Dreaming: Las Vegas

All pictures here!

This post title is not accurate. Las Vegas is not in California but more to the East, in the state of Nevada. The gambling capital is basically a huge bunch of lights, isolated in the middle of the dessert. I recommend the movie Casino to whoever wants to know more about the history of this so particular place. The city is organized around a main avenue, Las Vegas Boulevard, rather known as “The Strip”. Here is where the main casinos are located and, believe me fellas, the place is amazing. Each of the casinos is inspired on a different topic. The Bellagio reflects the beauty of the Como Lake in the Italian Riviera and is the scenario in which the movie Ocean´s Eleved is based. The Paris Las Vegas is a perfect recreation of the French capital, including a replica of the Eifell Tower, Triumph Arch and Louvre Museum. The Caesar´s, one of the most spectacular ones, decorated in a roman style. The Luxor, a 100 meters crystal pyramid. The Excalibur, a white castle with multicolour towers. The show of lights and neon is pretty impressive, amazing how much money is invested on this place. This is a pure tribute to luxury and richness. We stayed at the New York New York, a perfect recreation of the city whose name takes, with the skycrappers and a lower floor which simulates the main avenues and areas of the city. We booked it on the Internet and the price was not expensive compared to what we had been paying in some other places on the way. In Las Vegas luxury hotels are more reachable to low budgets, makes sense, what they want is you to spend the money gambling so the more comfortable the make you feel the better. In theory you get drinks for free if you are playing in a table but in practice the thing didn’t work out so well for me. There I was, with my limit of 60 dollar for spending on the game, hoping to get drunk for free while playing and save money but I wasn’t successful at all. It takes a lot of time for waitress to deliver the drinks so if you want to get one you have to spend quiet a while in the table, in this time, of course, you will spend a lot of money gambling. As Rober de Niro said in the movie I mentioned before, it does not matter how but they want people to play and play. And finally, casino always wins. In my case, first day I lost the 60 dollars and second one I won 20. In any case the ludopatia feeling you get in this place is fucking dangerous. Let´s say for example, you are playing the roulette, if you bet for a colour you can double the money you risk. It´s a 50% chance, you start thinking, “what if I put 300 dollar there and in a second I may get half of my trip paid…” You really need a strong will there, the gambling can become addictive. There you are, playing Black Jack and every time you win you get this euphoria feeling. And many people can´t stand it, even the people playing in the cheap tables I was (10 dollar minimum bet) was loosing shitloads of money. You could see the frustration in their faces but at the same time you could see they were not able to stop. Not to mention those tables where the minimum bet was 100 dollars, every small chip they were putting there had this value. The funny thing about this is the good atmosphere between the players, is something like we were all together against the casino. Every time you got good cards they were congratulating you as if was your skills and not the luck what got you the price. The place is, by the way, huge, plenty of rooms for playing and plenty of this triple 777 gambling machines. The direction of the Casino is not stupid and they keep displaying faces of previous winners on the tv screens all over the place. And as I said, every place has a different atmosphere, for example, at the Caesar´s all waitress are dressed up like romans. OK, enough talking, here some pics…

It is said that Las Vegas is the city that never sleeps, not for going partying I say. At 2 or 3 as the latest, all the casinos discos close down. The first day what we did not know here to go we ended up just watching the big poker games going on at that time of the night. The bars close but the crupieres remain working and the stay spending money on the tables until the next morning. Apparently, some casinos don’t even have locks since they are always open, willing to get all your money. About the night that first day, nothing too extraordinary, the funniest thing of the place we were was a piano challenge between two really good pianists (piano duel as they say). On the second day I managed to speak a lot with a guy in the hotel Jacuzzi (no gay thing ok?). A big fella, rugby player who had travelled quite a lot in Europe. Amazing guy, you could talk about any sport with him and he would always knew the important Spanish players. This friendly guy recommended us a few places to go for partying. We were even supposed to tell his name to the bouncer of one of them, apparently he was a popular guy there, but unfortunately we finally didn’t go there. We went to another one he recommended, a disco on the top of a high building with amazing views over Las Vegas. Here, once again, we could have a test of the American way of partying. Women are really funny here, they dance very dirty with a guy for a while, get him hot and them go to another one. Of course, excluding us, we were still transparent there. The thing is that most of the times I saw them leaving alone after getting everybody very horny… Weird.

There is not much to do in Las Vegas during the day unless you are gambling sick so we decided to vist the Red Canyon which was close by. First approach to the magnificent landscapes you can find in this huge country, later on we would have many of them. We also got to the Hoover dam, for a long time the biggest in the world. If you have seen the first Pierce Brosman’s Bond movie, it appears at the beginning, he actually run all the way down. Apart from all this nothing else to say about Las Vegas, I had one of my very usual absent-mindedness, loosing my credit car either in the hotel, a gas station or a Mexican restaurant. But I cancelled it straight away and fortunately nobody had time to use it. Next stop: Death Valley…