Vegas, Baby!

Here is the promised Vegas post just one week late.

So I am back from Vegas with the accompanying buzz. To say the trip was amazing is an understatement. For one thing, this is the first trip that we are taking after getting married, where we both travelled together. Usually, we get to the destination alone and meet up there. And of course Vegas is a fabulous destination, which ensured that the trip itself was fabulous. But lastly, we stayed at Bellagio. Best decision ever! While booking the hotel rooms, I was leaning towards some cheaper options, but S had insisted that we stay at a really nice place and for once I am glad that I had listened to him.

We were overwhelmed right from the time we walked into the hotel. I think Bellagio has some sort of deal with a glass company, because the whole place seemed to be done in glass. It is a big deal to me, because I always love works of art with glass. While in Hyderabad, I took a glass painting class and the painting I did still hangs at home. During my last vacation in Door County, I made it a point to go to an art gallery that dealt primarily with glass. I promptly fell in love with the whole place and bought this for the end table at my apartment.

So you can imagine my delight when I looked up from the registration desk and saw the ceiling.

After collecting the room keys, we walked down towards the room and saw a freaking glass flower garden.

Despite the fact that we had just landed after a 7 hour journey and lugging 2 bags, we stopped right then and spent some time looking at them in awe.

We went up to the room and were in for another surprise. We hadn’t asked for a room with a view at the registration since the hotel was really full. But we still got a room that overlooked the dancing fountains.

I know that this looks like a commercial for Bellagio and I swear I have not been paid to say all this, but this is the best place to stay in Vegas. The only negative thing that I can think of is that, all the restaurants inside were super expensive. We dined there about 2.5 times during the stay and two of them were breakfasts. The half meal was ingested on the night we landed when we were too hungry to venture out. We found this place and had a savory crepe that tasted just like masala dosa. It was just what we needed after a long journey.

We found cheaper dining options in the other hotels like the Ventian. Being vegetarians, I had figured we would have trouble finding good places to eat, but surprisingly every place we went to had vegetarian options or were happy to substitute.

We spent most of our time in Vegas gambling. And predictably we lost all the money we had budgeted for gambling and then some. We gambled the cash we had kept aside for cabs and lost those too. Initially I had planned to play the slot machines and only that. But then S had downloaded this blackjack game on my iPhone and I had spent the whole of April and May playing that and started thinking of myself as a blackjack pro. So we won some, lost some, won some and lost everything. Like S. Ve. Sekar says in Kaatle Mazhai, "Uttada pidikaren nu pidichidayum uttiye ba". Finally when we had just a couple of dollar bills left, I put them in some slot machines and won $15. Losing all that money gave me a really nasty feeling at the bottom of stomach and I was bad company to S for awhile.

After losing all our money, we discovered that there are other things to do in Vegas and went to a night club and danced our worries away. We also took the NY Roller Coaster ride at the NY NY Hotel and I think it's one of the best roller coasters I've ever been on.

We also went to the Stratosphere Hotel and waited in line for more than an hour to go on the ride called Insanity. We were so irritated that we didn't even think to take a picture of the ride.

Oh yes and how could we forget the show, considering that leaving Vegas without catching a show amounts to sacrilege. We did some research about a lot of shows. I wanted to watch The Lion King, but S vetoed it right away. We considered the Blue Man Group, but people told us it was very low brow and more of a family thing than a couples’ show. We zeroed in on Cirque du Soleil just because it was a very Vegas thing to do and got tickets for Zumanity at the NY Hotel. It started out alright and we were ready for some classy and sensual fun. But it turned to be very burlesque and not at all what we imagined. If all we wanted to see were topless women, we would have gone to some of the other infamous shows. The banter was very unfunny and middle school. I thanked my stars that we had just Balcony seats so that we wouldn’t have been pulled into the inane audience participation skits. To be fair, we enjoyed some parts of it. But S and I are not the type of people who enjoy watching people twist themselves into impossible postures. I remember last year when we accompanied our friends and their son to a Ringling Bros Circus show and I was bored out of my mind and couldn’t wait to leave. So the next time I think we will skip all this and catch a comedy show instead.

When Monday dawned, we were in no mood to come back home. In fact S called the airlines and tried to get us onto a later flight, but of no avail. We came back home tired and partied out and I can't wait to go back there again.

PS - All photos are courtesy of S. If you like what you see in this post, do visit his flickr page