Vegas

I am in Las Vegas for a couple of days. Back here after 32 years. The last time I was here, it was to attend COMDEX in 1983 when the IBM PC had just been launched. Memory sizes were measured in Kilobytes and Hard disk drives were an impressive 20 MB.

A lot has changed in Vegas. It is far more crowded and the strip is bigger. Yet in a strange way it seems more subdued. Back then in the 80s, the most famous casinos had running yellow lights and bright neon signs flashing. Today, only the Harrah's casino still has the running lights. Sands has been demolished. Caesars Palace is no more the grand oval building it used to be, it now looks like 3 large chawls.  The Golden Nugget, back then the flashiest of them all was nowhere to be seen. There are of course newer casinos now, The Venetian, the Palazzo,  the Luxor.

The biggest change I noticed however is how in your face Vegas has become. You only have to step out of your hotel and you will be accosted by touts trying to lure you to a strip club with promises of free drinks and a free limo pick up. There also appears be a little less discretion among touts. They were handing out leaflets advertising escort services and 'No holds-barred' entertainment even to people who were clearly with their wives.

One thing that seems to have changed for the better was that there appear to be a number of all women groups visiting Vegas. A couple of decades ago, it would be only stag groups, but clearly women are now confident of making their own money and their own decisions on how they wish to spend it.