[Vegas] The Bellagio

cadenzamuse and I went to Vegas for our Spring Break because I wanted to see the Magic Mike Live show.

The trip confirmed that we are not Vegas people, but we managed a good mix of standard Vegas Strip and off-the-Strip more-us kind of stuff and have a good idea of how we would do a second Vegas trip if we ever went back -- and maybe one of these days I'll do a blogpost of my recommendations for a Vegas trip for someone who (like us) is not that interested in gambling, drinking, and shopping?

Denzi at one point said that the current iteration of Vegas felt like it had been designed by a pre-teen girl because it's so Extra. I told this to Cate, who said her partner Jason (who like Las Vegas) says that Vegas is a young city, "It's a teenager, it wants beer and titties and to stay up late." This felt very accurate to us :) (Also tracks nicely with how Vegas is not nearly as Sin City as I was expecting -- e.g., last year's Thrillist article "A Naughty Travel Guide to Las Vegas Strip Clubs, Escorts, Brothels & More" and current marijuana laws in Nevada).

We saw various history-of-Las-Vegas books in gift shops, and after I got home I did some searching for university press books, and I haven't found one that looks like it has the comprehensive history I'm looking for, so a marathon of Vegas nonfiction is probably in my future -- including The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream by Stefan Al:

The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change.

Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.

All of which is to preface the Twitter/email exchange that happened today:

Sea, RTs Bellagio Las Vegas: The final touches have been added, completing our 5-ft chocolate sculpture of Marc-André Fleury now on display at Bellagio Patisserie. #GoKnightsGo

Zvi: My question, if you're going to make it 5 feet tall, why not go for full life size?

Denzi: omg Vegas, you have NO CHILL. ([Zvi] is right, though!)

me: I mean, it's the Bellagio, home of the giant chocolate fountain, so I'm pretty sure it's incapable of chill...

Denzi: Giant *purely decorative* chocolate fountain AND a giant room of rotating weirdo cut-flower fantasy flower garden exhibits.

(I love the Bellagio.)

[climbing] goals

For a while I've said that I climb 5.7/5/8s. [There are different scales for rating climbing routes, but the gyms I climb at use a scale where the easiest is 5.5 and once you get to 5.10 they start getting sub-ratings of a/b/c -- and maybe d? -- and go up maybe as far as 5.12.]

But recently I've been climbing 5.9s more regularly/easily (climbing every week really helps), and in reflecting on that after climbing last week, I set a goal for myself to be consistently climbing 5.9s by the end of the year.

I mentioned this to Molly tonight (er, climbing friend Molly, not to be confused with former lead pastor Molly) and she said I'm already consistently climbing 5.9s. I said but of the 6 walls I climbed tonight, only half were 9s, the other half were 8s. She pointed out that being able to climb something consistently doesn't mean you don't also climb easier things, and it sounded like what I meant by consistently climbing 9s was climbing 10s sometimes. Which, I had been thinking about the goal as having 9s be my new baseline (like how I've levelled up from comfortably climbing 7s and being able to do some 9s to comfortably climbing 8s and doing some 9s) but I hadn't thought about how the other piece of that is climbing 10s sometimes. I think I have successfully climbed a 10 once in my life (and I was like, "Was that really accurately labeled? Because I am not good enough to have been able to climb a 10 that easily."), and psychologically it feels like a more significant level up -- but that's probably just because it's still a step above the highest thing I can comfortably climb ... so the skills/strengths involved feel so beyond my capabilities ... but obviously as I consistently climb 9s more, I'll develop more of those strengths/skills.

(Oh, this reminds me that I should re-follow disobey_gravity, huh?)