The organizers from the Armenian community of the City of Angels promised free transportation and lodging, full board, and even a small allowance that was to be exchanged for gaming chips upon arrival. Lovers of free cheese were packed into a bus and taken to Vegas, where each of the 18 mandatory casinos counted them at the entrance. Before that, everyone was handed a memo with rules of conduct. It stated, in particular: “You must not abuse too strong drinks, not swear in English, not change women of easy virtue too often….”
After leaving the twelfth casino, I broke down and, persuading two other unfortunates, fled Nevada in a rental car. The whole way we had hiccups – the tour organizers had clearly missed some part of the sum due to them from the casino owners for delivering live merchandise.
The next visit to the phantom city was not so extreme and allowed me to look around. “Welcome to Disneyland for adults,” was the first thing the taxi driver said on the way from McCarran Airport to the city. Being bored in Vegas is as unnatural as dying of old age in Disneyland, suffering from heat at the North Pole, remaining hungry and sober in Georgia. When Hollywood screenwriters don’t know what to do with a character, they send him to Las Vegas. It is believed that there is no better place to say goodbye to bachelor life, celebrate coming of age, a promotion, or retirement.
The main attraction of Vegas is the hotels. They line up on a seven-kilometer stretch of the main street and replace everything that other places usually pride themselves on – monuments, museums, natural beauty. Let's start with Venice. At the approaches to The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, exact copies of the Doge's Palace and the Campanile loom. The hotel is encircled by the Grand Canal. Gondolas with tourists float everywhere. Among the gondoliers, for some reason, distant descendants of the Moors predominate. They perform Neapolitan songs to the splash of azure water. The smell of Venetian mold is replaced by chlorine. The apotheosis of the fake world is an artificial sky that changes color depending on the time of day.
From Venice it’s easy to get to Paris (Paris Las Vegas Hotel) with its Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde, cobblestone streets of boutiques and coffee shops. From here it’s a stone’s throw to New York. The New-York New-York hotel consists of copies of famous skyscrapers. The Twin Towers, the Empire State Building – everything is in place. At the entrance rises the Statue of Liberty. Have a weakness for ancient Egyptian architecture? The Luxor hotel and casino is at your service. The entrance to the 30-story pyramid of black glass is, of course, guarded by a giant Sphinx.
Vegas is the best place for those who would be satisfied with Venice without the smell of mold, Paris without beggars, New York without chaos, Monte Carlo without beaches, Luxor without the city of the dead. Moreover, it is the only place where humanity's dream of universal equality has come true. A person with a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket can easily feel like Sinbad at the entrance to a cave of treasures. All are equal before chance. Both those who relieve stress in VIP rooms with minimum bets of $10,000 and housewives who feed the next quarter – a 25-cent coin – into the belly of a one-armed bandit. Tourists from all over the world flock here not to improve their finances. That would be too simple. They rush here to settle scores with fortune. In this melting pot, 365 days a year, accumulated stress is burned, leaving casino owners $19 billion in annual profit. Few people, upon returning from this city, which resembles a 3D-printed model, will have the nerve to say that the game wasn't worth the candle.
What to Do in Las Vegas
* Visit the Bellagio hotel for the water show “O” by Cirque du Soleil, realizing that everything seen before this is not a show.
* Listen to your feelings when you feed the last quarter into a one-armed bandit in the hope of hearing the sound of a rain of coins.
* Savor lobsters and other delicacies at the buffets. Entry fee from $17 to $60, number of dishes and trips to the food stations unlimited.
* Understand the meaning of the phrase from the author of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”: “We are looking for the American Dream, and we were told it is somewhere around here.”
* Feel at home when you see the headless monument to Lenin at the entrance to the Red Square restaurant in the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Mikhail KRIGEL,
“Focus”.