After lunch we went next door to the Alladin hotel, which chose a perhaps unfortunate Arab theme for its hotel. The casino is one of the nicer looking ones in town, and the attached mall, Desert Passages, is a huge recreation of a Middle Eastern souk. Like most places in Las Vegas, they also have a trick ceiling, and this one has thunderstorms. I kept reading that it actually rains on people, which I thought was a good idea to get people out of the hallways and into the shops. But I only heard thunder and saw the fake storm clouds, so I'm not sure if it's true.

Thursday Somchai broke the bank at the Paris hotel, so I wouldn't be surprised if the hotel closed after our visit (actually I would since Stoli had already commented that he recently stayed there). He won about $4,000 in Wheel of Fortune jackpots in less than an hour. The hotel itself is very nice as well, along the lines of New York New York and Venetian. All the usual Parisian landmarks are there, and they've got guys who ride around on bikes wearing berets and carrying baguettes just to add to the faux ambiance.

One huge drawback in Las Vegas is the lack of taxis. There are plenty of them, I guess, but so many gamblers and conventioneers to cater to that the line for taxis is invariably long. So we usually walked from place to place, which in the case of our walk from Luxor to the Venetian meant a very long walk. The Venetian seems to be the most over the top hotel. They did an outstanding job of recreating the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal (except of course they put the Canal indoors and lined it with shops).

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Luxor is a pretty cool casino. A sleek black pyramid with a Sphinx in front, and a well-detailed faux Egyptian soaring atrium inside. The best thing about the hotel is that it basically gives away money. Somchai won the $1,000 jackpot here on the Wheel of Fortune game, then won it again ten minutes later. He wanted to keep going but we were gettting bored with winning all the time, so he gave his slot machine/ATM to somebody else.

It's now Wednesday, and Somchai's gambling fortunes started to turn in a big way. We visited the very tacky Excalibur first. It's a huge mock castle that makes no attempt to look authentic, or even attractive, and the interior is very "ye olde". It seems to be very geared to kids, so we didn't stick around long. I did, however, have my first Krispy Kreme donut. There's a neverending stream of publicity about these donuts, even overseas where they're not available, and I had to try donuts for which people were willing to stand in line for hours. So I was pretty disappointed to see the boring varieties on offer, and the taste? Like a donut. Overrated.

After lunch we went to New York, New York, which is our first genuinely themed hotel. It's on the small side, which isn't a bad thing, but very fun. The exterior, as almost everyone knows, is an amalgamation of New York landmarks in random order, with an equally random roller coaster careening through the whole thing. Inside, the eating and shopping areas are done up as New York neighborhoods, and the casino area does a fun interpretation of Central Park. We had a couple hours to kill here while we waited for our show to start, so we gambled a lot. I became a star attraction at one point when I won about $300, all in quarters pouring out of the machine.

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Across the street is an even bigger hulk of cement, the Mirage. It's got a bit of a tropical theme, but it's understated to the point of dull. It's only claim to fame is the volcano erupts in front of the hotel on a regular basis. It was apparently the first special effect attraction on the strip when it was built, but now it's pretty unimpressive. The hotel itself was supposedly the first "luxury" hotel in Las Vegas, a huge step up from the scummy Circus Circus and the like. I can believe that, but now it's been passed by all the newer hotels, so there doesn't seem to be a point to it anymore.

Tuesday morning started at the cheerfully tacky garden of the Flamingo Hotel. Apparently this hotel is steeped in Las Vegas history and full of gangster stories, but it's hard to take all that seriously when you're surrounded by pink flamingo statues. The garden is the only fun part of this hotel, though, as the building itself is just a big cement hulk.

On the way back we stopped at Treasure Island, a Caribbean island themed hotel, which puts on a famous pirate show during the evening. The "plot" consists of two boats shooting at each other while bikini-clad girls run around, then one boat sinks. There are lots of explosions, so again not a bad way to waste fifteen minutes, but it attracts roughly 2 billion people, so it takes an additional 2 hours for the crowd to clear after the show. After struggling like a salmon swimming upstream, we surrendered and allowed the crowd to carry us into the casino, which was an expensive mistake. Somchai decided we needed to recoup our losses by revisiting the scene of our morning success, Caesars Palace, but we just kept losing. Threw a bit more money away while walking through the Bellagio casino en route to the elevator, and at this point we weren't even stopping to see the result.

After dinner we walked down to the other side of the strip. There's quite a dropoff in glitz once you walk past the Venetian, which surprised me. There are still lots of casinos, but they're very tatty, and interspersed with empty lots, gas stations etc. It was even more depressing than the glitzier half of the strip. You will be shocked to hear that Circus Circus casino has a circus theme. It's the biggest hotel in this part of the strip, and actually one of the biggest hotels in the world. As an added bonus, it also has a huge RV lot for those gamblers who prefer to stay in their vehicles rather than splurge for a hotel. The casino is incredibly dirty, very low ceilinged, and covered in a carpet that hasn't been cleaned since the casino opened. There are some circus acts performing around the place, but the whole thing was very claustrophobic, and very crowded. There's a huge amusement park in the back that may have been interesting, but it closes in the evening to ensure that nobody is distracted from the gambling.

Having some technical difficulties, as my posts seem to move around a bit. So I think the Bally's post might show up in the middle of my Caesar's Palace posts, but then again, it might not. In any event, they have absolutely nothing in common, so you should be able to figure it out. Caesar's Palace did a great job of dressing up yet another drab office building with tons of Roman "ruins" and staying in theme. Well, actually, for no reason whatsoever, they have an exact replica of a Thai Buddhist temple in the middle of all this Romanness. I've got a photo with me posed in front of it,but I'm wearing an absolutely ridiculous shirt, so I can't use it. I think I was trying to dress kitsch to get into the experience, but it really didn't work.



The casino area's a bit of a mess, understated and confusing to navigate. There's a transition area linking the hotel and the Forum shopping area (pictured here), where we wasted some time waiting for the shops to open. This is where Somchai became addicted to the Wheel of Fortune slot machines, winning about $700 in fifteen minutes.

At some point during the day we also visited Bally's across the street from Bellagio. The visit was entirely due to our desire to be comprehensive, not because we were drawn to it on impulse. Because it's is one ugly hotel. It looks like a badly designed office building clad in blue and white plastic. And to get there you have to go through a silly Jetsons-like version of a habitrail tube. The interior is completely bereft of theme or design.

We then occupied our time with a visit to Shark Reef, the Mandalay Bay aquarium. It's very elaborately decorated, in a sort of ancient Roman theme again for no reason. And transparent tunnels run through these ancient ruins, through which you can walk and be surrounded by sharks. And that was completely entertaining for the fifteen minutes we were there.

Mandalay Bay is famous for having the best pool in town, but it looked horrible to me. It had lots of gimmicks like wave machines and water slides, so I guess that's something, but the ratio of guest to pool was terrible. The pools were surrounded by an army of deck chairs about ten rows deep, so it seemed like you might as well sunbathe in the parking lot and get the same experience.

We didn't really have a plan for Las Vegas during the day. I decided to treat it like a European vacation (not like the movie, which would probably have been more fun). We just went sightseeing around each hotel, treating each like a palace or museum. But I wildly overestimated their entertainment value. There's really not much to see, and it doesn't even register high on the kitsch scale. So we ended up doing a quick walkaround each property, then shopping and gambling a bit and moving on.



Our first stop was Mandalay Bay, which is supposed to be pretty high end and geared to a party crowd. It's one of the ugliest of the hotels on the outside, a gold embossed suburban office tower, and its location is almost suburban as well, right at the very end of the Strip and somewhat hard to get to. It's supposed to have an Asian theme, which I guess is where they got the name from, although as I'm sure you remember from the bloggers' visit to Mandalay, it's in the middle of Burma so it doesn't have a bay. In any event, the Asian theme is very understated, in fact, invisible. It had more happening bars and restaurants than the Bellagio, and seemed geared to a college kids on spring break sort of crowd.

It's illegal to take photos of casinos in Las Vegas, for no particular reason, but obviously nobody but us obeys this rule since there are plenty of photos on the internet. This is the Bellagio's casino, which is vast and one of the better looking ones. After our losing experience this morning on the spinning wheel, though, we didn't really spend much time here, usually just dropping some spare cash late at night before bedtime.

Woke up around 2 am Sunday, which was a bad omen for my jet lag recovery plan. I kept thinking about that movie where the couple goes to Las Vegas and the wife goes gambling in the middle of the night while the husband is asleep and loses all their money (anyone remember the name?). But I really hate casinos, not in a morally judgmental way, just that I find them so depressing and dull. So I resisted the urge to while away the hours at the casino, and woke Somchai up to have breakfast at 6 am. Selection was enormous, but more isn't always better when you're talking about warmed over buffet selections. We then wasted some time down at the pool, which is really quite nice. There were about six pools, all done up like an Italian villa, and seemed like a good way to work out a pool complex for 6,000 rooms that wouldn't feel like spring break in Fort Lauderdale.

Here's the hotel exterior. As per my previous post, it's really just a huge nondescript hulk of a building, although they've added a very lifelike Tuscan village along an artificial lake outside the hotel that is the only thing that gives it a personality. The lake is hyperactive, with an enormous fountain show going on more or less continuously, accompanied by loud music. It's nice enough during the day, but definitely more impressive when lit up at night, at least for the first fifteen times I saw it. Bellagio: Overall: 7 (Room: 7, Facilities: 10, Service: 4). By way of explanation, no 6,000 room hotel is going to compare favorably with the hotels we usually stay at in the service category, but I gave them extra credit for facilities, since the smaller hotels are unlikely to have dozens of restaurants, a huge casino, shows etc either. And if you're going to stay in Las Vegas, this isn't a bad option, although now that Steve Wynn has opened up his new place, that's supposed to out-glitz the Bellagio. So you may want to try that, or go for something more kitschy and less blandly corporate, like New York, New York or the Venetian.

Here's the view from our room. Directly across the street is the Paris Hotel and its Eiffel Tower replica, as well as the dumpy Bally's Hotel. The view of the Strip is really best at night, when it is a bit special. During the day, most of the hotels look like huge office buildings lining an interstate, with the occassional Eiffel Tower or Sphinx plopped down nearby. What I really liked was the desert view beyond the casinos. I don't really spend much time in the desert, so I found it very interesting to see the barren mountains in the distance, particularly when juxtaposed against the silliness of Vegas.