I've never been in
the airport lounge before. I got overexcited and had two helpings of free
buffet breakfast and accidentally filled my water bottle with sparkling water
because they have sparkling water on tap as some kind of sick practical joke.
Due to the pressure of both carbonation and take-off, the water bottle gently pissed itself like
an incontinent old dog, leaving me slightly soggy. But I'd rather be a damp scruff with beans on his jeans than the man I
overheard in the lounge demanding that the attendant fetch "the good champagne”that he was certain they were
hiding “somewhere in the back”.
I always think I’ll have a productive flight. But no, I drank wine and watched Shrek and then
completely failed to make the high score board of the inflight Tetris game.
Landing
I’m always a bit nervous about going through customs. I worry that the sniffer dog might
come after me even though the most illegal thing I ever owned is a pilfered street sign (which was
already broken and semi-rotten anyway, officer) and I don’t tend to carry it
with me on international flights.
We got through passport control and walked into a country of mass-incarceration, a country
that declared war on drugs, a country
where law-enforcement have guns. And the sniffer dog was waiting for us. And as we walked towards baggage collection, the sniffer dog followed us. But obviously it wasn’t pursuing us. Why would it be pursuing us? It must have been after someone else walking in the same direction.
“Excuse me?” we looked around. The sniffer dog was pursuing us but it was its handler who was talking. And the dog wasn’t mistaken. It had correctly identified illegal substances in our bags. All my fears had been realised.
But this dog wasn’t trained to find cannabis or cocaine or heroin. It had identified a particularly pungent banana in my bag. You are not allowed to bring fruit or vegetables into the USA. There are several observations that could be made about the state of the American diet at this point, but they are low-hanging fruit and have therefore been confiscated.
So, having been instructed to bin our fruit by the sniffer dog’s very friendly handler, we were spared jail time. While the pooch clearly did his job very well, it does seem like he got an easy gig. Teaching a dog to locate food seems more like its natural skillset than getting it to sniff out heroin wrapped in a condom and popped up a drug mule’s back passage.
Bubba Chump
The first thing we did in San Francisco was find some food. It was a misty mid-afternoon in reality, but a hazy 3AM by our body clocks.
We went to Bubba Gump Shrimp. I assumed that it was just named after the fictional business in Forrest Gump and would do some safe, bland, chain-restaurant food to scoff down before a snooze. It was and it did, and it was so much more.
I’m not convinced that films should spawn eateries. The Ratatouille restaurant would be closed down by the hygiene inspectors. The Lord of the Rings pizzeria would have over-complicated three-course starters. And the Marvel Culinary Universe would repeatedly serve the same flavourless microwave meals to a surprisingly enthusiastic clientele and that’s fine because everyone should just enjoy what they enjoy.
The Friends cafe, however, does seem to be successfully touring the country. If it’s financially irresponsible for us millennials to drink takeaway coffee and eat avocado toast, paying to drink coffee and eat avocado toast on a replica of the set of Friends is likely to send us into personal double-dip recessions.
I digress.
The bubbly American approach to customer service can be a little jarring when fatigue has reduced you to monosyllabic misanthropes. When the waitress came over and told us that she was about to do some trivia, we assumed that there was some kind of pub quiz going on. Instead, having ascertained that we do actually have the film Forrest Gump over in England, she happily quizzed us on the characters and events. She was particularly impressed that we knew that his girlfriend’s name was Jenny.
When not answering impromptu quizzes, we had a great view of Alcatraz island. For a moment the cold and perfunctory service of the prison canteen seemed more appealing than the 10-staff-member recital of Happy Birthday happening a few tables over. Especially as we later found out that, in an attempt to maintain inmate morale, Alcatraz food was the best in the prison system. See, even the trivia there is more interesting.
San Fran
Initially San Francisco was like the setting of a Scooby Doo episode. It was strangely quiet, shrouded in mist, and there were spectral cars driving themselves around. A creepy clown sat near the seafront, blaring out music (from a speaker) and bubbles (from a bubble machine). He yelled “konnichiwa” at some Asian people as they walked past. They gave no indication of being Japanese.
Having Googled Scooby Doo episodes set in San Francisco, the only one I could find involved a haunted mask in Chinatown. As we searched for clues, all we found was a restaurant that boasted about once serving Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton has mediocre taste in Chinese food.
We cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, a beautiful seaside town full of bicycles. There was a shop selling jewellery, art and miscellany supposedly imported from Europe. The shop owner misidentified me as Dutch so I liked him (surely no one has ever taken “you look British” as a compliment.) If we showed any interest in an item, he picked a price and told us that “for you,” he could sell it for about 30% less.
We stumbled upon a building housing a scale model of the San Francisco bay. It took up two acres and revealed that the Golden Gate is the least impressive bridge in the bay. It’s like Mars, it’s just the most famous because it’s red. Jupiter and the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge are both bloody massive in comparison.
This would have been the location at which Velma starts to put the pieces together and hatch a plan. We would have to catch the racist clown. As the first person we met, it was all his fault. We would lure him into a restaurant that Bill Clinton had once visited, pounce on him, and finally discover how he’d used bubbles to reduce the population of San Francisco and how he was powering the ghostly self-driving cars with racism. Then we’d lock him in Alcatraz and have a triumphant bowl of chowder.
But in reality, the self-driving cars were due to our proximity to Silicon Valley, and San Fran’s quietness was due to the dawn of remote working in a notoriously expensive city. Ironically, the villain was covid, and un-masking was not going to help the situation.
Baseball
We sang the national anthem, paid homage to all of the troops ever as undeniable heroes, and thanked a private healthcare company as “Jump” by Van Halen was played on an organ. That, it turns out, is how a baseball match begins.
Yes, there is a Farmville slot machine. I expected rows of one-armed bandits, but instead there were infinite clusters of vertical curved screens displaying digital slot-machines with Candy-Crush visuals. Some were themed on civilizations (Sphinxes for Egypt, dragons for China), some had Gene Wilder on them, and some showed a happy piggy bank gleefully beaming, satisfied with a belly full of cash that it extracted from you in record time. The slot machines are the most abundant and least interesting thing in Vegas.
The casinos are sprawling resorts containing restaurants, bars, hotels, water parks, a full circus, and/or an exhibition of Princess Diana’s belongings. Some are opulent, with Sistine Chapel-esque ceilings and fountains that dance to *Time to Say Goodbye.* Others are gimmicky with pirate ships or medieval battlements. But gimmicky isn’t the right word, because that suggests naffness. These casinos have fully committed to their theme. There is an actual pyramid with its own sphinx. There is a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. Actually, “theme” isn’t strong enough either. A theme is for a fancy-dress party. If Las Vegas turned up to a fancy dress party it would awkwardly stand in the kitchen surrounded by people in tacky Amazon costumes as it tried to explain why it had painted every inch of its skin a violent shade of red (this metaphor is based on a true story).
In Excalibur, the medieval casino, I found Sherwood Forest Bar. It didn’t look much like Sherwood. I wanted to be snobby about America’s borrowing of history and culture due to their own lack of it, but then I remembered that Nottingham Contemporary has a ‘*Welcome to Las Vegas*’ inspired sign and Leicester has its own tiny statue of liberty. Perhaps the East Midlands should be twinned with Las Vegas?
Vegas has its own far more impressive version of the statue of Liberty. And it throws in a Coney Island and a rooftop roller coaster just for good measure. It also has a recreation of Venice, complete with overpriced gondola rides. But Vegas doesn’t need these facsimiles of landmarks, it’s already a landmark in its own right. It’s *Las Vegas.* It’s like you’re eating a curry and the waiter brings you a freshly baked pain au chocolate and a slice of pizza to have on the side, along with a glass of chocolate milk from the chocolate milk tap. It’s over the top, it’s overindulgent, it’s just plain silly, and that’s exactly why you love it.
Fountain Ducks
Occasionally you see through Vegas’s facade. There’s a lost helium balloon bumping up against the sky of fake Venice. You pick up the cutlery at a nice restaurant only to find a shiny, silver-colored, plastic spoon. You see ducks in the Bellagio fountain and share their confusion as to how you or any of your surroundings have found themselves in the desert of the Las Vegas valley.
Billboard-vans drive along The Strip bearing the words “ESCORTS IN YOUR ROOM IN MINUTES.” I thought that Grand Theft Auto was a satire of America, but it’s just Google Street View with a soundtrack. As we walked along the strip, men handed out cards. I expected flyers for a show or a discount coupon for Subway, but they were handing out trading cards. But instead of stats they had phone numbers. And instead of Pokémon they had women. And instead of special moves they had… special moves.
Being of a gingerish persuasion, the Vegas sun forced me to apply factor 50 at regular intervals. As I re-applied outside M&M World, a lady sat down beside me and asked for some suncream. She rolled up the leg of her jeans to reveal dark skin turned flaky and scaly, saying “I’m looking reptilian. I’m Queen Elizabeth.” As she rubbed the cream in, she said, “Now watch a reptile turn into a turkey!”
Vegas was teeming with the kooky and the quirky. It doesn’t judge. It revels in eccentricity, unshackles inhibition. And then there was the man who was simply standing on the strip with his penis hanging out. While everyone should visit Vegas at some point, I really have to insist that what happens there is contained, fenced in, prevented from escaping, that it *stays* in Vegas.