It is everything you think it is. Except weirder and more.
Las Vegas is a fake place that still manages to exist.
"The City That Never Sleeps." "Tinsel Town." "Old Gambley."
As a first-time visitor, I was familiar with Las Vegas' reputation as a kitschy "Disneyland for adults," and its legacy — both pop-culturally and historically — as a citywide den of gleeful debauchery, constructed by sheer force of will in a desert wasteland so devoid of life that most theologians agree it was where God tested the atomic bombs that killed the dinosaurs.
Yet here exists a collection of improbable monuments to success and pleasure, presumably built upon catacombs lined with the skeletons of forgotten gangsters, where, even in recent memory, you could be locked inside of a walk-in freezer or exploding car for accidentally looking at Frank Sinatra's girlfriend's necklace area.
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"Las Vegaaaas" —Dean Martin, probably
But I was also aware of the Vegas of today — in no small part thanks to the conscious rebranding efforts of their tourism officials — reinforcing Las Vegas' second life as both a family-friendly resort town and internationally recognized nightclub haven, where gambling is tertiary to the Vegas experience, if not outright discouraged, and DJs, magicians, and celebrity chefs tower above grateful commoners like benevolent space kings, whose very tears of joy fall to the sidewalk as tinkling diamonds, and all of us are moving parts in a cosmic joy machine.
So yeah, I figured I had a pretty good idea of what I was in for.
Ethan Miller / Getty Images
Here is what it's actually like to visit Las Vegas in style, and all of the things you can expect to happen to you while you're there.
Your hotel will romanticize the past, but exist in the distant future.
This is the lobby of The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, or "The Cosmo" as the world's coolest cab driver insists we refer to it.
A relatively new hotel, catering to a younger crowd, The Cosmo has a lobby that features video-screen pillars with rotating themes that synchronize with the elevator monitors and act as the welcome screen on your hotel room television — sort of like living inside a screensaver.
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