What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas

I have been deciding for the past few days whether to write the second part of our Christmas trip to Las Vegas or just let it stay secret (like the tagline from the Las Vegas ads). There were certain aspects which I like about Las Vegas. As a recovering shoppaholic, I was impressed with most of the shopping malls within the Las Vegas strip (especially inside the hotels) which open till 12am and they still stay open on Christmas Day. There were also plenty of partying clubs with cover charge above $100 to countdown to the New Year with invited stars like Goo Goo Dolls, Shannon Elizabeth, etc. And also due to the explosion in Las Vegas tourism and real estate, there were many resorts/hotels which opened or got into this thing called timeshare or vacation ownership. In a nutshell, vacation ownership is a multi-billion $ business and it is something like joining a vacation club and then able to vacation anywhere in the world for a cheap price which can also be passed over to the kids after we die. However the cheapest membership option is around $11k which is not cheap. The good thing about attending this vacation ownership presentations is the many free gifts they provide. But for me, the hardest is to say "no" because I'm a person who can't say "no" easily. We were tempted a few times to join the club but eventually I stuck to my ground and decided not to get it. We attended 3 presentations on the same day in the morning (because there's nothing much to do in LV in the daytime) and the fruits of our wasted time were $50 Planet Hollywood dinner, $100 shopping voucher at the Treasure Island hotel, $50 free slot play (which my wife used to win another $50), $200 tickets to watch a show called Zumanity, another 3d/2n stay in Las Vegas which can be used at another time plus a 5d/4n stay in Hawaii. So not too bad for a hard day's work attending talks.

Since prostitution is legal here, there were many hispanic people passing out callgirl cards. They have a certain style of hitting the cards (with a clicking sound) and passing it out. There were many topless pics strewn across the floor, not to mention there were many unwholesome shows too. So before long, the surroundings would influence the mainstream. The show Zumanity by Cirque du Soleil was an example of that. Cirque du Soleil was formed by a group of poor street performers in Canada and now they have taken over Las Vegas and the world with their mixture of circus and fantasy. Each big hotel has their own Cirque show: MGM Grand hotel with Ka, Treasure Island hotel with Mystere, Bellagio hotel with O and New York New York hotel with Zumanity. Even one of the ex Cirque bigwigs, Franco Dragone, is the creator of Celine Dion's A New Day show at Caesar's Palace.

My friend told me that he saw Zumanity before and it was different. Since I got those expensive tickets for free, I was looking forward to see what it was all about. We took our seats for the 10:30 pm show after enjoying ourselves at the Irish pub nearby. Zumanity is a cabaret style type of show with a woMan emcee. S(he) was quite foul-mouthed funny and made dirty jokes. The show was all about exploring our sexuality with many risque circus fantasy performances and some funny ones. There's no outright full frontal nudity but lots of topless ones which after awhile, doesn't seem unique anymore. The people giving us the tickets said that it was supposed to look tasteful. One of the performance photo which I found on the internet is the one called 2 lilies of the pond, which is something like topless chinese female acrobats doing their weird body contortions and stunts just like water lilies. Normally on family oriented shows, they are fully clothed but now you can see their ribs bending at odd angles because they weren't clothed. Gross! There were other weird characters in the show like a pair of fat lady twins, a dwarf, a half man half beast, plus others. The funny parts are the jokes and audience participations. There were other performances which I think is not good to be mentioned here. In the end, Zumanity is not just another side of Cirque du Soleil but it also brings out the dark side of our humanity.