Hell of a first time in the USA.

How time flies by, doesn’t it? Because I had to finish my PhD thesis, I intentionally neglected my blog this year and tried to pour most of my free time and writing inspiration into that. Now that’s it’s done and undergoing revision, I get to write freely again and it feels good. 🙂 Back in the 2025 blog anniversary post I mentioned that I have a fun new business development job. Apparently the business trips were off to an unexpectedly crazy start this year – the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January, hailed as the most powerful tech event in the world where we were exhibiting our new in-wheel motor product; followed by a customer visit in Japan right during cherry blossom season. My coworkers said I shouldn’t get used to it and considering how lucky I got with these two trips I’ll probably get hit by a truck on the next one for balance, but you only live once, right?

At this point I should probably explain that I was never one of those people who fantasise about the American dream and visiting the USA, which will likely be reflected in this post. I grew up with Hollywood movies and both the good and the bad of Western propaganda on the Internet and the TV, so I freely admit that I am a bit of a European snob. I love our leftist social welfare systems, free healthcare and education, quality food and our “no guns for civilians” policy, which also means that I have some prejudice against the American way of life and its hardcore capitalism. While I know that is not fair and am always trying to respect other cultures and reserve judgement, visiting Las Vegas of all places hasn’t really alleviated my prejudice – if anything, a week full of American stereotypes on steroids has somewhat reinforced it. So, while I will be as honest about my experience as always, please take it with a grain of salt if you have never been to the U.S. as Vegas definitely isn’t a representative sample and this is coming from a person whose biggest must-see wish in the USA besides the national parks is visiting a Walmart (spoiler alert: I haven’t managed yet).

With this unnecessarily ominous intro out of the way: Las Vegas is A LOT as an experience, but it’s also a lot of fun. I would be willing to bet that anyone would find something to suit their tastes and trying out the party life was also surprisingly affordable, particularly for women. There are very few cultural activities in the classical sense, such as art, history, museums etc., which are obviously not the main things you would want to do in in a place like Vegas, but their absence is still palpable, as you can typically find them providing a contrast of depth to the purely fun activities in every larger city. Instead it is all loud and proud show business and bright surface-level entertainment at an impossible scale: flashy, kitschy, glittery, mesmerising, overwhelming and designed to draw you in and keep you going until you drop or run out of money (or most likely both). Pure adult fun without limits and absolutely no judgement from me – that’s the job of the street corner doomsday preachers and Jesus sign-holders outside the casinos. Well, maybe if I am being fair, I was judging the I love sugar store a bit – pickled flavoured gummy bear hair cotton candy should just not be a thing.

Impressions of las VEGAS

On the first night of our stay, my coworker promptly won at roulette by placing it all on number 8 because his father-in-law told him to do so, which was entirely unbelievable and so lucky that the rest of us gave up on gambling altogether. Since we were exhibiting at CES 2025 (you might have noticed the professional and very jet-lagged photo of me inside the wheel of our exhibit above), we were staying at the Strat hotel. While it is one of the more iconic hotels in Las Vegas and used to be the world’s tallest building for a while, it is also a bit outdated so the price was relatively affordable for Vegas standards during CES and it can be considered walking distance from the exhibition grounds.

Well, at least to the exhibition hall where we were, because the CES is huge and spread out across several locations. It is an overwhelming trade show where all the major tech companies and all the small startups that can afford it bring their latest and greatest in futuristic technology – giant autonomous tractors, fancy cars, AI-powered virtual experience cubes purpose-built just for the show, holographic TVs, personal flying pods, robotic dogs, neural haptic rings, snore-cancelling earplugs and pretty much everything else you can imagine and I barely got to see a fraction of it. CES is an engineer’s dream and a testament to human creativity and ingenuity, but it is very accurately placed in Las Vegas, because half of these inventions aren’t really necessary. They serve the purpose of luxury, hedonism and of always pushing the consumer experience a step further to keep us wanting and buying more, but I guess that is the price of tech progress today.

A GLIMPSE OF CES 2025

So, back to Vegas: like probably all the larger hotels in Las Vegas, the Strat has a 24/7 casino with a maze of slot machines in the ground floor, as well as an indoor McDonald’s and Starbucks, 2 swimming pools (which were closed) and different evening entertainment shows. I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that people still smoke inside casinos and that pretty much all of U. S. drinks and food are served in plastic cups and on plastic plates with plastic cutlery even if it’s not a take-away situation, although that impression was somewhat corrected in diners and fancy restaurants. I was even more unpleasantly surprised to learn that there was an ice machine opposite my room – people in Vegas seem to need ice at all possible hours of the night and the ice cubes make a really loud, clattering noise if you are trying to sleep off your jet lag.

Last but definitely not least, the Strat’s tower has a 360° observation deck on top with a roller-coaster, a free-fall Big Shot ride and the option to base jump all the way down. There are apparently still people out there whose job is to press buttons in elevators and the roller coaster was unfortunately closed, but we went for a ride on the Big Shot just as the sun set on the last day – did I mention my coworkers are fun? We had a beer in a plastic cup on the observation deck afterwards and I don’t think I’ve ever been as drunk off of one beer on an empty stomach and 45 miles per hour’s worth of free-fall adrenaline before. Then we went out for deep dish pizza to settle our stomachs, because I naturally had an American food wish list and my coworkers were more than happy to oblige. The deep dish pizza was actually really good, as long as you close your eyes and disregard the word “pizza” and any association with the original Italian dish. That about sums up my attitude towards food in the U.S.: a lot of it is delicious if you don’t think about the calories, but they are definitely using the wrong words to describe it.

Next on the list of American foods I managed to try were proper BBQ meats with too sweet cornbread, comfy southern cooking with an incredibly pungent gumbo that nobody liked, delicious garbage-loaded hot dogs, creamy bagels with salmon, very tasty Denny’s diner breakfast food (we were all surprisingly in love with the spinach smoothie until we realised it was because it contained about 30% of sugar), typical avocado toast, Cinnabon cinnamon rolls on steroids and Starbucks. It took me a bit to figure out how to order drinkable coffee in Starbucks, but again, if you think of it as a fancy warm drink experience instead of coffee, it’s quite nice and I am now a fan. I also witnessed a true Netflix drama moment of “did you just assume my gender?” courtesy of a Starbucks barista and an unfortunate clueless Chinese businessman and I somehow managed to skip McDonald’s and fries altogether.

THE strat free-fall view and all the FOOD

We had a challenging experience with the Delta airlines customer service, because they managed to lose the luggage of 3 of my coworkers. Considering there were only 6 of us that was a very unfortunate 50/50. The luggage was eventually found and was chilling at the Las Vegas airport for 2 days before they bothered to deliver it to our hotel according to some other unfortunate person’s wireless earphones location service. Anyhow, because of the lost luggage, we ended up visiting Ceasar’s palace, which is a huge casino hotel complex with a very expensive shopping mall in the centre of Vegas, vaguely inspired by – you guessed it – the Roman times. The shopping mall is about as historically accurate and as bloated and opulent as the 1963 old Hollywood Cleopatra movie with Elizabeth Taylor. It wants to look like a Roman temple and has a blue-purple indoor sky ceiling with little perfect clouds. I don’t think there are any two-digit price tags in the whole building, so my coworkers had to make do with a very limited clothes selection and industrial grade Old Spice deodorant, since the other options were “I went to Vegas” souvenir T-shirts or rented Elvis Presley tuxedos from the express wedding chapels.

The rest of the Vegas fancy central district was very much like the shopping mall – giant hotel complexes, each with its own theme centred around various old world European attractions: Paris, Venice etc. Although no doubt impressive and probably a luxurious experience for those who can afford it, the whole central district had a sort of sterile, unreal, artificial vibe with too clean and too safe streets; like a climate-controlled biodome zoo for rich people where everything is an exaggerated, overinflated facsimile experience of the real thing. One of our Italian business partners was beyond horrified when he heard a wealthy American family telling their child that they’d finally brought him to Venice as promised, which is kind of sad considering that they could’ve probably afforded to visit the real thing. However, the water fountains show at Bellagio was pretty fun.

There are so many party options advertised everywhere it’s difficult to keep track and I found it kind of funny that there are also dayclubs, beach bars and pool parties where the party starts or rather keeps going no matter the time. Although we didn’t really have a lot of time off, we managed to go to one of the clubs where Benny Benassi was headlining the evening. The best way to go out is to sign up on the guest lists online (there are a lot of websites if you Google “Las Vegas club guest lists” and most of them are free, so don’t bother paying for any commission fees) and if you arrive before midnight when they are still trying to fill up the clubs, you can get in for free or for a reduced fee. It’s often free for women, while men have to pay and there’s a limit to male-only groups entering to keep the ratio of women and men even. There’s often also a free/discounted drinks type of deal for women until 1am (mostly cheap, extremely strong vodka mixer drinks to loosen any inhibitions you might have left, which feels slightly predatory, but a free drink is a free drink as long as you keep your wits about you). Because of this, our club night out in Las Vegas was ironically the cheapest in my clubbing experience – I ended up paying only 10 dollars for the coat room and zero for the entry fees or drinks, because the free drinks were so strong they were more than enough. My male colleagues were of course not so lucky.

CENTRAL LAS VEGAS & PARTY VIBES

One thing I really did not enjoy were the Latino toilet attendants selling cheap souvenirs and jewellery in the clubs and restaurants and the unsafe vibe on the streets. Every time I visit a large capital city I am eternally grateful to be living in a tiny, objectively safe European country and never more so than in Las Vegas. I now completely understand the urge to take an Uber instead of a 5 minute walk as soon as it gets dark, although the safety and sanity of the Uber service in Las Vegas is somewhat debatable, as some of the drivers were definitely not fully sober. I was also a bit disturbed by the amount of homeless people on the streets and how many of them were not in the right state of mind – seeing a homeless man taking a dump in the dumpster by the side of the road on the way to breakfast was not the most unusual sight of the week.

The class divide is noticeably extreme and it was very easy to tell who was barely making minimal wage and also how many people were using drugs by the state of their teeth and nervous jitters. Another element of culture shock was the lack of basic manners, which we are so used to in Europe that even people who aren’t paid enough to do their lame jobs are usually reasonably polite. The Vegas experience was interesting in that respect: anyone working a job where they could expect to receive a tip (and we did tip) was exceedingly aiming to please, while others were so over it that they were often somewhat obnoxious – given the state of the economy I can’t say that I blame them at all. Also, people in the U.S. really like loud communication for some reason, maybe that’s why there were so many Italian immigrants coming there back in the day.

Which brings us to downtown Las Vegas, a uniquely raw experience and in my view a rather dystopic mix of everything and therefore obviously my favourite place in Vegas. What constitutes downtown today is where Las Vegas first began and also how it got the nickname Sin City, so all the oldest mafia casinos are there. The so called Freemont street experience looks like a long, wide, high-roofed mall passageway and it is an overcrowded madness – live concert stages of different music genres every 50 meters, numerous bars, strip clubs and food places competing in some kind of extravaganza or dirt-cheap prices, flashy old school casinos with blinking lights and enticing money promises, enormous labyrinths of dodgy souvenir shops and random smaller souvenir stands. All of this is mixed with the full spectrum of talented street performers to con artists, brazen pickpockets, half-naked sexy folks of all genders and fetishes, random giant dancing gorillas and flash mobs, a significant amount of bad-tempered police in full riot gear, even more bad-tempered homeless people on wheelchairs loudly running over people’s feet or quietly trying to stay sane on the sidelines, as well as apocalypse-now, repent-all-your-sins sign-holders with surgical masks who are the only unwavering, static pillars of perceived virtue in the flow of the partying crowd.

All of that is further underpinned by heroic drunk tourists flying overhead on a zipline across the entire street and also the Heart attack grill restaurant nearby where sexy nurses do who knows what with greasy meat and barbecue sauce and where obese people over 350 lbs (175 kg) eat for free. Freemont street is as glorious and as demented as it sounds and it is a perfect example of why aliens don’t want to be friends with us. If you have ever played the Fallout: New Vegas computer game it will all feel like a wonderful deja vu and dare I say not that different even though the game is set in a post-nuclear war era. Also, the edgy pink techno night club we went to was called Discopussy – enough said.

THE FREEMONT STREET EXPERIENCE

All in all, it was definitely an interesting first experience in the USA. Would I recommend going specifically to Las Vegas? Probably not, because you can find better parties elsewhere. However, if you are already in the U. S. and somewhere in the vicinity, then I think it is definitely worth going, because it is a unique experience and severely underrated by Europeans. Both Paris and Las Vegas share the nickname of the City of Lights, but while the first has to do with elegance, hedonism and the finer points of life, the second is bright neon, unrefined and unapologetically decadent. And yet the streets full of drunk people smell the same and the bad decisions will look equally bad in the morning no matter where you are, so at least the Americans make no pretence about it: what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, especially on a business trip.