Las Vegas....and all that vague us...

Hi!

Sutapa and I were in Las Vegas last weekend. It was a very "interesting" experience..cannot really understand , if i hated that place or just mildly disliked it or did i love it ... isn't that vague??

Let me try and explain, rather vaguely explain.. I found Vegas to be a place of excess- excess people, excess drinking, excess gambling, excess honking, excess jostling, excess illusion...kind of excess of all kind excesses. The illusion aspect was very interesting, I was told that "The Strip" is only a small strip of road and one can always walk up and down the strip. The first day on the Strip, we wanted to walk down from Belagio Hotel to Venetia Hotel..and I could clearly see there Venetia hotel BIG neon sign and it just looked like a 2 mins walk...so we started ..and even after 2 bottles of water, quite a few gulps of oxygen and intermittent swig of Budweiser, we were still not there..that was my first brush of illusion at Las Vegas. The hotels and the neon signs are so built that they all look very near...but start walking and you will Keep Walking. So if anyone is planning a visit to Vegas, instead of walking try the bus service, its very good and cool too ( you don't have to brave the 100F + temperature).

You go to Vegas and don't talk about gambling...nah..thats not possible . I am not really a gambling guy, i believe in safe bets..very very safe bets BUT we still played the slot machine. There is a saying in Vegas "Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"..and now I know exactly what it means..whatever $s I gambled in Vegas stayed in Vegas :). Don't ask me how much. An experience in the Casinos is a must. I was told that only 40% people who come to Vegas gamble, wonder what the other 60% people do ?? They cant be possibly climbing trees, because there are more Casinos than trees in Vegas....wonder what they do may be they only drink and are too drunk to gamble or may be there are more "earthly pleasures" in Vegas which i missed.

The best part of the visit was the Indian restaurant called Gandhi. Not sure if Gandhiji would have liked a restaurant named after him, that too one that served liquor and non-veg.But the food was great, the chicken tikka masala and the garlic nan was better than Karims... or was I feeling homesick ..maybe..

We cannot leave a place without shopping, can we ? I will not bore you with too much on this shopping thing..but yes we did buy. We bought a hookah...yea yea a hookah, of all the crazy stuff that we have ever bought in our different trips, this was the craziest of all. If the hookah survives the trip back to India, you will see in my den on the bar table..so look out for it when we do the house warming party.

I have still not been able to learn how to post pictures along with the write ups, will try and learn it over the weekend. Then I will write about Grand Canyon and post the pictures. I will try to wrap this is over the weekend, but it looks all packed with Sunil, Shruti and Sutapa planning to go on a Shopping binge where I need to be their chauffeur :) ( wow that will be 4 Spower and poor me!!! so please pray for me )

I love the comments, so please keep them coming, and talk to you soon.

Ramen