Learning to Love Las Vegas

I’m a Paris person. A Marin county person. A Cape Cod person. And lately, of course, I’ve been a stay-at-home person. But one person I’ve never been, and never anticipated being, was a Las Vegas person.

All my life, Vegas has conjured a very specific set of images in my mind – a supercut of the dozens of girls trips I’ve judged on the social feeds of my high school friends, college classmates, and younger cousins. Bachelorette brigades sauntering down the strip in matching ‘Bride Tribe’ tees. Sunburnt suburbanites dayclubbing in bedazzled bikinis and nightclubbing in bandage dresses. Group photos taken by a stranger beneath Caesar Palace’s faux sky, posted in their original, slightly-askew glory. Snobbery is one of my sins – though I try to fight it – and what I perceived as the city’s cheap artificiality has always surfaced my snark. Vegas is a place, I’ve proclaimed more than once, that I’d only go to ironically.

And yet, two weeks ago I boarded a plane for the first time in nearly two years, flew to the desert, and had a decidedly unironic good time in Vegas. 

It wasn’t a good time, to be clear, because I became a new person, one easily beguiled by buffets named Bacchanal, by fake Venice gondola rides, or by margaritas sipped from Eiffel Tower-shaped plastic cups. I still side-eyed billboards advertising a hologram Whitney Houston show and guffawed at a used-car-lot-style sign advertising ‘Renoir/Dali/Gaugin’ in Comic Sans. But Vegas, I quickly discovered, is much more than that. 

I was in the city for work, but I took the day’s earliest flight and arrived hours ahead of my colleagues. After dropping my bags off in my room at the Sahara, I took an Uber 30 minutes south of the city to an art installation called Seven Magic Mountains, walked aimlessly amid the madness of Fremont Street, and watched day fade into dusk at the Neon Museum, which boasts an incredible collection of dozens of disused strip signs. The next morning, I treated myself to a back alley graffiti tour of the Las Vegas Arts District, followed by latin hash at Makers & Finders and a visit to Writer’s Block, a multi-hyphenate bookstore/writer’s workshop/coffee shop/“artificial bird sanctuary.” It was lovely.

This whirlwind tour – of food and art, walking and books – wasn’t remarkable because it was a departure from my usual, albeit rusty, style of travel. It was remarkable because I never expected to be able to do it in Vegas. From afar, the city’s propensity to party, to boast, to be big and bold and unapologetic, repelled me. But, up close, the city has variety, beauty and even soul. It was a huge surprise.

And even when it wasn’t surprising – when I was drinking a cotton candy mojito at an inexplicably decorated José Andrés restaurant, or wearing the lone chunky sweater amid a sea of deep-cleavage ensembles at Circa’s rooftop bar – I was, at least, having fun. I managed to shed, if only for moments at a time, my uptight New York self, and become someone else entirely. Someone who might even consider posting a stranger’s grainy picture of her taken at the Wynn.

It’s nice, sometimes, to be wrong about something.