Las Vegas

We arrived in Vegas around 7:30pm, too late to go to the opening reception for the conference. We were also exhausted.

We stayed at the Wyndham Grand Desert hotel.

We dropped our stuff everywhere in the big suite. We had the one at the end of the hall that takes up the whole width of the building but also requires you to walk the whole length of it after you get off the elevator.

Our posters had been delivered to our hotel after being printed in Vegas. Also we left a bunch of luggage there that we didn't need in the canyon.

Outside our tower was a pool and hot tub that were open 24 hours. After I checked my email in the computer room, I went in the pool and hot tub with everyone else. The hot tub had some hot waterfalls you could sit under.

The first night we went to a Chinese restaurant where we ordered some dishes to share among us all. It was a very good meal. All the meals in Vegas were quite good.

Then a couple people went back to the hotel but the rest of us wandered along the strip looking at hotels and walking through some of the casinos.

When you're on the strip everything is so big and they've also copied monuments from other parts of the world, like the Eiffel tower. The funny thing is the strip is only about 12 blocks long on one street and then the rest of Vegas around it doesn't have many high buildings, so from the air it looks really weird and also really small.

In the afternoon on the first full day of the conference was the poster viewing. I stood by my poster but even though I was #3 I was squished into a tiny aisle with a poster directly across from mine about 5 feet away. #3 means I was the 3rd person to submit a poster. For some reason, #51 was the one facing the door as you entered. I had a good chat about my poster with the one group of people who had a poster on a similar topic - decision support in the OR.

That evening we had dinner with the people from Salt Lake City because Matthias now works with us and used to work with them at the U of U. We had dinner inside the mall of the Venetian which was also the conference hotel. The mall is made to look like you are in outside Venice, or some Disney version of it. There is a perfect, lit up blue sky above you and there are canals with motorized gondolas on them. The gondoliers sing songs to their passengers as they pretend to steer the gondolas with their paddle while really steering with their foot. The Mexican place we ate it was really very good, although when we asked about the Happy Hour special which they had a sign for they said it was only for people sitting inside. As if we really were outside....under the fake sky.

That night no one really wanted to walk around and see things so I went off by myself to see the part of the strip in the other direction from the night before. The four big hotels in that direction, all around the same intersection were the MGM shown above,

the Excalibur,

New York, New York,

and Tropicana.

Here is the view of the Excalibur from my bedroom.

The next day was another full day of the conference but we decided to go see a show after the conference banquet. The banquet was quite good. It was in a club with waiters walking around with appetizers, an open bar with a limited selection (beers were pretty much just Heineken or Corona) and then a buffet of Italian-ish food. I had a good chat with some undergraduate students from UBC who were randomly at the conference and at one point confused with us because the organizers didn't know there were two groups from UBC. One of them said that another project he is working on is getting ready to install many charge stations around the lower mainland for electric cars. That is awesome.

Anyways, we went and saw the Blue Man Group after the dinner. I didn't really have any expectations. It was pretty cool. They are quite funny in how they act like children or aliens who have no idea how things work and so they play around with things in a musical art-making way. There was some audience participation which may have been planted because although the lady acted pretty normal, she was hilarious in her reaction to the blue men. Near the end of the show they basically toilet papered the whole audience, which I thought was quite the waste of paper.

I immediately thought my sisters would love the show, except that they should not visit Vegas until they are a little older. There are people on the streets everywhere trying to get you to come see naked ladies.

After the show we went to a couple different bars and walked around Vegas some more but I eventually went back to the hotel room and then for a dip in the pool before heading to bed at about 4am. I woke up a few hours later and was the only one from our group who went to a bit of the conference that morning. I took down our posters and brought them back to the hotel so we could pack up and check out of the hotel just a little late.

Our plane wasn't for a couple hours later, so we hung out in the lobby and pool area. Some guy walking by asked us what this donkey show was all about, but I have no idea.

Also in Vegas I gambled a little in the slot machines and as usual I could have won a few dollars if I'd walked away after the first 10 minutes, but instead I lost everything I put in.

Overall I was much more impressed by the Grand Canyon than Vegas. Vegas is a really weird place that I don't understand how people can live there regularly. The show we went to was pretty cool and I would like to see more shows but I think I will just catch Cirque du Soleil when it next comes to Vancouver.