So I went to Vegas with the fam last week.  As you can probably guess from my other posts, I’m not really a Vegas kind of guy.   So it’s not really much of a surprise that I was not a huge fan of the place.

More than anything else, it was the falseness that bothered me.  The morning I realised the ‘milk’ I was putting in my coffee (the little disposable kind given out at restaurants) wasn’t really milk but a ‘non-dairy’ chemical substitute almost did me in. 

There was a fake Eiffel Tower, a fake sphinx and pyramid, a fake pirate ship, a fake Venice, a fake NewYork skyline, a (horrifically ugliy) fake castle, fake milk, fake water (they had some sort of flavoured water at the buffets), fake lion habitat [on a side note one of the animal attendants was bitten there last week, unfortunately I wasn’t there] and it goes on.  Damn the place itself is fake: a garden city in the middle of an arid desert (in the midst of a decade long drought).

Then there’s the fact that until the weekend of the Pacquiao – De la Hoya fight [see some of my pics HERE] pretty much all the Filipinos I saw there were low level employees (I was even asked if I worked in one), or were naked on sex industry magazines and business cards distributed everywhere.

No this is not really my kind of place, but there were more interesting parts for anyone interested in my recommendations:

– if you have to stay in Vegas I would stay in the downtown (or “old Vegas”) part of town.  It’s more of what I expected: seedier, less Disney-fied.  The”Strip” was horrible with it’s themed stupidity (ie. Casinos’Hotels called The Venician, Paris, The Excalibur, etc.).

– get out of town entirely.  The desert was beautiful, though getting out there is discouraged as I could find no one who knew of any public transport heading out there (I only saw it on a packaged Grand Canyon tour).

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In the pics I’m showing in this set I focused on the surrounding area around The Strip.  I’m sure everyone has seen pics of the tacky and craptacular Strip so I didn’t bother with too much of that.  I was facinated by all the empty arid lots just a block away, this is also where low level casino employees live…