Loquacious Las Vegas lathering.

So this is half of a traveljournalism/alternative article I started but never finished on Las Vegas after my trip there when I was 18. It's never been finished, mainly because I don't know where to put it. Thought I'd whack it up here regardless.

Walking through the Strip was like walking through a cocktail you didn't order. Garish, sickly sweet, and afterwards you'd be covered in smells and tastes you never wanted, or ever dreamed of ever wanting. Lights from casinos, steakhouses, and bars that were far less classy than even you're thinking right now glared through eyelids and less whispered more shouted, nay, hollered promises of the full bellied and empty walleted kind.

I walked past an aspiring pop group, with their own stage and soundsystem, right there on the street. They were probably recently rejected by one of the record companies that have their offices on the fringes of the city, and were desperately trying to garner some other attention, hoping their public would carry their legend back into offices and to the ears of suited managers driving tinted windowed hummers (yes, they really do do that still.)

They were actually quite good, which made listening to them heartening and sort of pitiful at the same time. Their small,brightly lit island amidst the neon sea of the street was being swamped in by the very charisma tipsily tripping in from all directions.

This was the brightly lit warm and fuzzy center that could be seen if you squinted down to your right when you were at the top of the faux eiffel tower at Paris Paris. If you panned to your left, you could see the rest of the city, all the way out till where it ended abrubtly, like someone hadn't completed the level on a city builder simulation. The soup of Las Vegas was banded with a large swathe of sand, circled in turn by the Nevadan mountains where the rims of the desert basin ended. Las Vegas was really a thriving nucleus of an empty and barren cell, isolated for miles in all directions. If you were here, this was it. Really.

Staying at Caesar's Palace was a conundrum in itself. The impressively decadent facade of the outside smeared in ivy leaf and dotted with plastic statues of gods no one knew the name of hid no lies. Julius himself beckoned you in permanently, stood outside his Palace, a warped dream of his that is now part of an empire the Caesar line could only be envious of. What it promised in lewd and excessive detail on the outside, it delivered in spades on the inside. The lobby of the hotel (though it is more true to say hotel-casino, megaplex, eternal warren...) was carpeted in rich red, swirling miasmic patterns leading the eye to slot machines, more statues, cheerily enormous TV screens and gilded surfaces. Bellboys and reception girls with impossible smiles snapped to attention at your gaze with effortless grace