Day 2

Day Two – Wednesday 16^th April  

The Strip

(Walking the Las Vegas Strip)

Perhaps the most striking thing about Las Vegas is its walkability, at least on the Las Vegas Strip, with bridges over the roads, meaning you never have to attempt to navigate the traffic, and wide sidewalks, as can be seen in the photo, that can accommodate a vast number of tourists, make it easy to navigate your way down the 4.2 mile Strip from casino to casino. America after all isn’t famous for being friendly to walkers and Las Vegas at first glance seems to be an unlikely place to buck this trend, Portland maybe but not Las Vegas. Though this walkability only really extends to the Strip, if you were to turn left or right and leave it behind the ease of walking quickly declines, and returns to favouring driving as the form of navigation.

Although this makes sense if you think of Las Vegas, and more specifically the Strip, as more of a theme park than it really is a city, offering attraction after attraction for the visitors to wander between as they explore the Strip. There is even a roller coaster which wraps itself around New York-New York. Las Vegas is selling itself as a theme park based around the ideals of the American Dream. By this I mean it offers tourists the promise that they can visit the city and strike it rich, because theoretically you could walk into any of the casinos with just a few dollars and come out with a fortune. Instead of different types of rides Las Vegas is offering different types of gambling – slot machines, black jack, poker.

 Much like Disney Land all the hotels are designed around a different theme, such as Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, Italy and the Big Apple, which allow customers to fulfill their fantasies of staying in a pyramid or the Empire State Building, while also being able to experience the gambling that Las Vegas offers. They offer a fabricated experience that while fake looks believably real, it is an illusion but a very good one.

If you take New York-New York for example, as you can see in the picture above, the skyline does look believably like the one you would see in the Big Apple, and from a distance the Statue of Liberty actually looks almost genuine. However if you take a moment to do the knock test, to see if something is hollow or not, the hotels reveal themselves to be simply plaster board which has be manipulated to suite the theme, meaning that the hotels can be pulled down and replaced quite easily if they ever become redundant.

(Botanical Garden in the Bellagio)

Like all theme parks, the Strip and its casino’s offer other attractions for the less adventurous, those who can’t or don’t want to gamble, such as the botanical gardens in the Bellagio. The casino’s offer family friendly activities so the patrons can bring their children along, it can be a holiday for the whole family instead of just a parent’s weekend away, and when you get bored of the games floor there are pools, art galleries, restaurants, bars and luxury shops waiting to ensnare you.

 In fact the casino’s themselves are very much like Venus flytraps, once you get inside it’s really hard to escape again, with the dark lighting which mask the passage of time, attractions and winding paths, it’s very easy to get trapped inside the belly of the beast. We spent more than an hour in the Bellagio, with a good chunk of that time being spent finding our way out again, because if you venture further into the casino’s, they don’t sign post the exits at all, after all they don’t want you to leave and spend your money in another casino. The more time you spend inside the more likely you are to be tempted to use the games floor or buy a meal or have a piece of jewellery or clothing catch your eye.