Week 12: Las Vegas

I bet you're all wondering why I posted this on a Monday instead of the usual Thursday. Well this past week I spring broke and traveled to the faraway land of Las Vegas, Nevada. A far cry from the place of glamour and riches that Hollywood has made it out to be, Vegas is actually the land of cigarette smoke, public drunkenness, and overpriced everything. There was so much to complain about in Vegas that I began to question why anybody would travel there at all. I've laid out my four main points, in typical fashion, for your benefit. Take them or leave them, but don't expect to experience Vegas any differently.

The Drunk People: For those of you that don't know, Las Vegas has no open container laws. This means you can walk around on the sidewalk with a beer, margarita, shot of Everclear, what have you. For most people, this is great and it makes Vegas unique. However, it also means that there are drunk people around all the time. And I'm not talking about slightly tipsy, giddy drunk. No, I'm talking about dancing on tables, stumbling down the sidewalk, throwing up in trash cans and yelling at telephone poles drunk. At 10 am. We were walking around one night and we heard some drunk guy yelling at a group of people. This is what he said, verbatim, at a full-blown scream: "MONEY'S NOT A PROBLEM. I'VE GOT MONEY. I'VE GOT 480 BILLION IN MY BALLS." Now I've thought about this a lot since I heard said 50 year-old man brag about his balls, and I'm still not sure if he was talking about his sperm count or if he's got the world's most expensive testicles. Either way it was a pretty jarring thing to hear on an otherwise uneventful (as far as Vegas goes) night. That's just one example of how crazy the drunk population of Las Vegas can be.

Yeah

The Ridiculous Prices: Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, in Vegas was ridiculously overpriced. We went to McDonald's one night for a "cheap" dinner and to our dismay, the dollar menu had been replaced by the "McValue" menu. Everything on the McValue menu was two dollars. That was upsetting to say the least. We went to Subway a few days later and the footlong sandwich I typically get was $12. Do you know how absurd that is? That's $1 per inch. If you break that down it's about $0.25 per bite. That better be the best damn Subway sandwich I've ever had in my life. A beer that costs a dollar at a bar in Columbia costs an average of $9 at a bar in Vegas. If math isn't your strong suit, that's an 800% price increase. Pretty much the only thing that's truly free in Vegas is walking around on the sidewalk, but we tried to avoid that at all costs.

Home of the $10 Big Mac

The Slow Walkers: Those of you that read last week's post know how I feel about slow walkers, and Vegas is like Mecca for those people. Walking down the strip (the main street with all the hotels and casinos) should be considered a form of torture. At one point my roommate commented, "I could move faster with concrete blocks attached to my feet." I think the only difference is that with concrete on our feet we would've actually gotten some exercise walking at that pace. Nobody should question why our country has an obesity problem when they can go to Vegas and watch a bunch of people walk down the street slower than the tectonic plates are moving under their feet. I thought huge groups of people walking slowly on college campuses were a problem until I went to Vegas. We spent more time behind herds of people than we did doing nearly anything else. And it doesn't help that it's impossible to walk down the sidewalk without being hounded by hundreds of people trying to get you to go to their nightclub or pay for an escort. We were walking across a pedestrian bridge and a guy came up to us and said, "strippers and midgets?" How do you even respond to that? We just looked at him and said, "um, no thanks?" We spent the entire week behind a bunch of slow walkers and constantly got approached by club promoters. It's a wonder we were able to get anywhere on foot.

New Year's Eve or a typical night? Impossible to tell

The Smell of Vegas: Vegas reeks of cigarette smoke and regret. Unlike most other civilized places in the US, you can smoke pretty much anywhere in that city. This includes your hotel room, casinos, bars, bathrooms, taxis, restaurants, clubs, you name it. You don't truly realize the value of personal space until you've walked through 70 clouds of cigarette smoke in the span of an hour and a half. By the time we left, my entire suitcase smelled like a 65 year-old chain-smoking former stripper, and that was just from being present in the city for a week. There's not enough laundry detergent in the world to get that smell out. I had to save clean clothes for the plane trip back so people didn't think I was sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom.

Are you really playing slots if you're not bothering everyone around you?

Vegas is unique, there's no question about that. There's nothing like it anywhere else in the world. You know what else is unique? North Korea. That doesn't mean I want to go there.

I hope you all enjoyed this Las Vegas edition of Cole's Complaints, and on a Monday too. How exciting. I'll see you all later this week for yet another complaint.