I Dropped My Jaw in Las Vegas

Talk about Las Vegas, and images of sexily clad croupiers, sexily clad *ahem* "entertainment personnel" and sexily clad desperate housewives come to mind. Well, to my sexily clad mind, anyway. Found out that the Stratosphere, which is where we were staying for one night, had an adults-only, tops-optional swimming pool. Getting better and better! :D

But, honestly speaking, the eye-candy was a little lacking. The croupiers were all totally covered up. Didn't see any "entertainment personnel" possibly because we only went for one show, and totally avoided the clubbing scene. It was too cold for scanty clothes, and the adults-only pool only had plenty of topless guys. (I could totally imagine all the eyeballs hidden behind the sunglasses swivel towards Yi Lin when we got to the pool, haha)

So, only 3 things really made my jaw drop in Las Vegas. Yi Lin has already written about the Fountains at Bellagio, and the Cirque du Soleil performance, O. That leaves me to write about the iPod Vending Maching (iPVM).

A vending machine for iPods! What!? *Jaw drop*

In addition to the usual display case where you can see the items you're buying, there is also a console on the right of the machine, where you can check on the product features of the items. Payment is all by credit card here, so that is where you swipe your card too.

Full frontal of the big white machine

Well, the iPVM probably only uses the iPod brand name to attract MacHeads like me. Apple products comprise of only slightly less than half of the merchandise offered. The other products offered here include PSP games and other accessories.

Buy a PSP, buy God of War - Chains of Olympus. All your entertainment needs satisfied.

It just opens the mind up to all the possibilities of a simple vending machine, doesn't it? Put it in a Singaporean context, can you imagine parents buying past years' test/exam papers for their kids from a vending machine in a nearby MRT station?

Swearing off McD's until further notice

Email that I sent to McDonald's USA:


Dear Sir,

I regret to feedback on a truly disappointing experience at the McDonalds restaurant, specifically the one across from the Sahara monorail station in Las Vegas.

My wife and I had planned a quick supper after watching a show along The Strip. Our plan was to catch the monorail back to our hotel before services ended at midnight, and drop by the McDonalds nearby for a burger and some McNuggets.

To our dismay, we found that this particular restaurant was already closed for seat-in customers, and was only operating the Drive-Thru. Not a problem. We were perfectly willing to do a takeaway.

After waiting almost 20 mins for the Drive-Thru to serve the line of cars, we approached the counter and asked if we could order some food.

To our surprise, the supervisor-in-charge absolutely REFUSED to take our orders, stating that he was only allowed to serve drive-throughs. We tried to reason with him - It was late. We were already near our hotel and just wanted to get some food and go back to our room. We were tired after standing along the queue of cars and feeling grubby from all the exhaust - but to no avail.

The supervisor adamantly said that HIS supervisor actually spends time reviewing video footage of the night before, and will sack him if he serves us. He told me straight in my face that taking my order was not worth losing his job! My wife was so exasperated that I could see tears forming in her eyes - a heartbreaking sight for any man.

Eventually, we had to ask the driver of the next car in line to order food for us. This was not just embarrassing to us as individuals, but to the very concept of service quality from McDonalds!

I would like to know:

1) Is serving takeaways at Drive-Thrus against the law in Nevada?
2) If not, is it a policy enforced by McDonalds?
3) If this is neither law nor policy, then why is there such a rule that is so strictly enforced, that an employee should fear dismissal for making a sympathetic decision?
4) We were told that we would not be served unless we were in a car. Why the discrimination against people who do not drive? For the record, we were in between car rentals having driven from California to Nevada, and having moved on to Arizona the following day.

We have traveled and eaten in many restaurants (fast food or otherwise) around the world, and have never, ever felt so unwelcome by a restaurant before. This is such a shame.


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Response from McDonalds

Hello Dannie:

I want to thank you for taking the time to share your recent experience at the McDonald's in Las Vegas, NV with me. Your feedback is very important to us as it allows us to better understand how we can improve our service to you.

I am sorry for the unprofessional service you received. Please be assured that we want to provide you with an exceptional experience every time you visit us. From your email, it is clear we did not meet your expectations. Again, I am truly sorry we disappointed you.

Concerning your inquiry regarding McDonald's policy on walk-up orders in the drive thru, for safety and security reasons, many locations will not accept walk-up orders. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and your wife. I want you to know that I have already taken action on your feedback. After reading your email, I immediately shared the information you brought to our attention with the local franchise owner of the restaurant you visited. Additionally, I notified our regional McDonald's consultant who works with this owner for follow-up in the restaurant and appropriate corrective action.

Again, Dannie, thank you for sharing your feedback. We appreciate your business and we hope to have the pleasure of serving you soon.

Jennifer
McDonald's Customer Response Center

(footnote to MCRC reply)

Please do not "reply" to this email response. No "replies" can be received through this mailbox. If you wish to contact McDonald's Customer Response Center again, please visit our website at www.mcdonalds.com (which is another painful experience, because you have to have the address of the @%^$@^ McDonald's you visited!)

Whether The Weather

Whether the weather be cold
Whether the weather be hot
Whether the weather
Whatever the weather
Whether we like it or not

In a nutshell, we've been putting up with whatever the heavens have been throwing at us - unforgivingly hot sun, strong winds, lighting, rain, dry air, desert storms. And even snow. When we least expected it. Crossing into Nevada, we thought that we had escaped the throes of Death Valley back in California and were heading into what seemed like gloriously good and sunny weather. But we seemed to be driving into a blank blurry white wall in the distance - and we were wondering why the clouds in Nevada were so big that they stretched from the sky to the ground. And then little white bits started flying into our windscreen.

That white blurry wall? That's a huge curtain of snow.

Driving into Las Vegas through snowfall.

Being warmblooded tropical creatures, it took us some time to realise that it was snow. Snow in Las Vegas? Uh huh. Wow. It turned out that Las Vegas had been hit by a cold front which dumped snow in the area and was moving eastwards... to dump more snow on where we were heading!! Argh. Evil cold thing was laying snow in our path! Needless to say, we spent the next couple of days freezing in Sin City.

Over the past week, this freak cold front has covered Denver in snow, leading to some of the highways being closed. Much as I like being warm and toasty, I'm glad we missed out on the 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celcius) heatwave in Los Angeles, where we were just 2 to 3 weeks ago.

Whatever the weather, we're still having a good time. And not missing the humid Singapore weather too much yet.

Viva Las Vegas

Welcome to our new blog! Well, it's still the same blog - just with additional features, such as different coloured text entries for each of us. So when you see text in this colour, you'll know straightaway that it's me (YL) writing. Other perks are that it's easier for us to upload photos on this site and we will be able to include links and videos in our entries too.

We're sitting here in Provo, just south of Salt Lake City, in Utah. It's a small but pretty city surrounded by snow-capped mountains, with tulips and daffodils blooming along the road. But more about Provo later. We've got a few stories about our time in Nevada and southern Utah to catch up with.

In our last entry on http://www.blogabond.com/danyilin, we had just left Death Valley for Las Vegas. So this entry is about Vegas. We had wanted to move over to Blogger earlier but thought it was very ominous to start a new blog with Death Valley, so we thought the gleaming, glittering, sexy city of Las Vegas would be more apt (never mind that it's also known as Sin City.)

Some interesting blips of info about Las Vegas gleamed from the Internet:

(1) It means "the meadows" in Spanish. Apparently, some Spanish explorers were crossing the desert in the 1800s when they came across a lush green area supported by artisan wells and termed it 'las vegas'.

(2) Apparently, as seen from space, the Las Vegas metropolitan area is the brightest on earth.

I can't vouch that these are absolutely true (cos I wasn't there in the 1800s nor have I ever been in space) but interesting nevertheless.

I've always known that Vegas probably wouldn't be a place I would like to be in for long. But we thought that it would still be pretty exciting to visit simply because:

(1) It was VEGAS after all - Sin City, City of Lights, The Entertainment Capital of the World, etc. And the saying "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" certainly piqued our curiousity. So what exactly does happen there?

(2) We wanted very much to catch Cirque du Soleil's "O" performance - resident at The Bellagio because the US$100 million dollar complex water stage makes it too expensive for the show to be staged anywhere else.

(3) We wanted to get married again! (to each other of course)

So we booked ourselves at The Hilton for US$60 a night on 15 & 16 April through a fantastic online deal. It definitely was beyond our budget - after all, no matter how glittering and sexy Vegas is, it still has its share of cheap budget motels. But it was a deal too good to pass. Unfortunately, all good tickets for 'O' on these nights had been sold out but tickets for 17 April at a 25% discount were available. After some considerable hemming and hawing, we extended our stay in Vegas at the Stratosphere for another US$60.

Being amongst the minority 14% of visitors to Vegas who don't gamble, and we couldn't afford to be watching shows every night, we didn't quite know what else there was to do except to explore all the hotels on the Strip - which would be pretty interesting since all of them were themed differently. Well, so we thought. After our third hotel, we decided that all hotels are the same in that:

(1) visitors are forced to walk through a maze of jingling clanging jackpot machines in order to access every single lobby, restaurant, monorail station, shopping mall, hotel room.

(2) every European-themed hotel prides itself in having a fake blue unchanging sky. Enchanting - not. If I wanted to see pretty blue skies, I would just... step outside?

The Venetian - where night never falls.

(3) they all try to create fake make-believe worlds and in order to stand out, many make use of poor animals as gimmicks to draw the crowds. We wormed our way through the gambling tables at Caesar's Palace in search of the wonderous aquarium and we deeply saddened by what we saw. Dull-spirited sea creatures, mostly fish and rays, pacing up and down the miserable length of their water prison. We didn't even bother with the poor sharks, flamingos and lions in the other hotels.

The free daily shows, mostly in the evenings were slightly better. At least the actors prancing around in wet skimpy costumes in the chilly spring weather got paid for performing. Animals don't. The volcano at The Mirage and pirate performance at Treasure Island involved fireballs and pyrotechnics, which were pretty entertaining.

Watching things go KA BOOM at The Mirage.

Ooops! Someone blew up the treasure onboard.

Pirates with pyros.

My favourite was the famous water fountain at The Bellagio. Spaced at 15-minute intervals, each 3-4 minute show is choreographed to a different tune. It was so simple - just nubile water sprays dancing to music in soothing, fluid, wavey movements. I didn't take any pictures, but here's a link to the one I watched, choreographed to 'Time To Say Goodbye'. In fact, I think the only hotel worthy of praise on the Strip is the Bellagio - for it's classiness and that it wasn't trying to recreate a place that already existed elsewhere on earth.

Besides the Bellagio, I was really keen to see was The Venetian. Firstly because practically everyone I know has seen the Macau version. Secondly, it's work-related - Sands/Venetian are the folks who are churning out the Marina Bay Sands back home by end 2009. So it was a bit like a sneak preview of what's coming up on our shores.

A taste of Europe out in the desert.

Crossing the bridge from Vegas into Venice.

Make-believe Italian art.

Summertime at St Mark's Square

Whee! Someone breaking the speed limit on the waterway!

And what do I think about it? I'm sure the Venetians and the Sands around the world will have their fans. And I'm glad that what's coming up back at home will be more than blue skies, fake canals, singing gondoliers and canal shoppes. I'm thankful that the casino will be housed separately from the other amenities, so that visitors in search of a meal or who simply want to enjoy the resort need not be subjected to the endless jangling of jackpot machines.

By our third day in Vegas, we were dying to get out of the city. We were tired of walking up and down the Strip (too expensive to buy monorail passes for all 3 days) and getting lost in the indoor maze of hotels. The only things we truly appreciated were 'O' (the theatrics were so wonderously spectacular that I gasped a few times) and the comfortable hotel beds. Everything else was fake and artificial. Everything stood for excess, frivolity, greed (okay, we succumbed to ONE buffet), temptation, mindless entertainment (with the exception of a few truly artistic shows) and hedonism. A place devoid of any value or heritage (an empty desert in its true nature) and built solely upon entertainment conjured for the enjoyment of humans.

Will I ever go back to Vegas? Nope. But I'm glad for the experience anyhow - even though I didn't get anything out of it.

Taken on our upteenth time walking along the Strip.

I guess Vegas can look pretty at times. A little.

Oh, we didn't get to renew our wedding vows in Vegas under the blessings of a fake Elvis Presley or space alien. It was just too expensive for our budget. But who needs a wedding in Vegas to know that you're blessed with a loving marriage?

We definitely don't.