Sin City
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Lee and I met the most interesting people yesterday. We were on a hike, in the mountains of Panama; it turned out all the others in our group were Americans, roughly our age. Two of the women are old friends who travel together as often as possible. After the hike, we had lunch together, so we could keep chatting—we love making new friends.
Before the hike started, we were doing the usual round robin where-are-you-from-how-long-are-you-here introductions. One of them was from San Diego. It wasn’t till lunch, though, that I figured out that the other one had moved to Las Vegas fairly recently. We’d spent the previous three hours comparing travel tales and picking each others’ brains about cool places to go. After all that travel talk, when she said Las Vegas, I caught the tiniest hesitation, almost imperceptible. As if I might be unimpressed.
I get it. I used to have that hesitation myself, as if I was vaguely embarrassed to admit to going to Las Vegas. For about a decade now, maybe longer, Lee has had to go there fairly frequently, for meetings and conferences and things like that. For a long time, I had no interest in going. Then I went once and we stayed in a hotel that was probably the nicest I’d ever been in at that point in my life, & I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad, but it was just so boring. And garish. And plastic—shallow. It might ruin my travel cred.
I thought I was above all that. I’d rather spend my precious travel time (back then, when we had kids at home, travel time was very precious) somewhere interesting. Somewhere with culture or history or some kind of transformational experience. I don’t gamble, and the shows are expensive, and it just didn’t appeal. I don’t feel compelled to ‘party,’ whatever that’s code for. I don’t want to totter around in 6-inch heels and a sequined micro-mini.
And if you don’t love Las Vegas, I understand. Maybe you’d rather see the real Eiffel Tower, or maybe you’d rather go to a part of the desert that isn’t dotted with swimming pools, or maybe you just prefer not to pay $15 for a glass of orange juice. I get it.
But I’m no longer willing to make excuses for my love of Las Vegas. As a matter of fact, as I write this, I’m positively longing for a hit of Las Vegas. It’s pure escapism, a place where I can forget the rest of the world exists. It’s . . . perfect. There are no stray dogs. The taxis are clean. As an English-speaker, I can read the menus. And if, by chance, I order a bowl of vegetarian noodles and they come to the table with a pile of chicken feet on top, I can communicate the error to the waitstaff and get what I wanted. The electricity works. The tap water is safe. I never have to smell sewage.
The climate is utterly controlled. The streets are paved; as a matter of fact, there’s not an inch of that pesky natural world to be found, anywhere. I think if they ever figure out how to control the weather, it’ll happen first in Las Vegas. Maybe it already has.
I know I’m stating the obvious here; much smarter writers than me have pointed all this out more elegantly and eloquently. Las Vegas is a dream world—we all know that. It lets us step out of our normal lives, live in a dream, forget reality, dabble in different identities.
That’s why I love it. We were there last year, for some workshops Lee was doing, and for about five days I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven.
People from all over the world want to visit Las Vegas; we meet them all the time. “We want to go to New York and Hollywood and Las Vegas and Washington and Miami.” (I’ll save my thoughts on that insanity for another day.) We always see tons of international tourists when we’re there, and last year, for the first time, I wondered what they thought about it. Was it what they expected? Did they think they were having an “authentic” American experience? Did they wish they’d gone to a small town in Nebraska instead?
When we left, we flew to Raleigh to visit family and have all our annual medical appointments. We stayed in a comfortable hotel. There were no stray dogs, the Ubers were clean, I could read the menus, the electricity worked perfectly, the tap water tasted fine, and I never smelled even a hint of sewage.
Maybe Las Vegas is just what happens when we push the American dream to its natural conclusion. It’s more—bigger, brighter, better. Move the homeless people off the sidewalks, hide the sewage, everyone smile. It’s totally fake. But it’s definitely, authentically American, and part of me really loves it.
Take care,
Lisa
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