Vegas diary, part 7: Mandalay Bay, the “Mandastench”, and what’s across the street

For the past week and until last night, this was home:

It’s Mandalay Bay, a hotel at the southernmost end of the Las Vegas Strip, a four-mile-long stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South lined with hotels, casinos, resorts, shops, and other tourist-focused places. I was there with The Girlfriend — she was attending a conference, and I was availing myself of the free hotel room, and a birthday change of scenery (my birthday was November 5th).

As soon as you walk into Mandalay Bay, you’re hit by the overpowering signature smell that they pump into their HVAC system. The scent, which is intended to “brand” Mandalay Bay as much as any logo, reminds me of having my head rammed into a humidor full of coconuts. A quick search for the perpetrator of this olfactory obnoxiousness yields conflicting results: ScentAir’s site claims culpability, and they say it’s called “Coconut Spice, while other reports including this 2010 article on Las Vegas hotel scent branding (even the guy who created those scents says the hotels are overdoing it) and this summer 2013 report on a lawsuit filed over the nasal assault names AromaSys as the guilty party. No matter who makes the smell, which I like to call the Mandastench (or Mandastank, if I’m feeling more “street” that day), it’s terrible, and it always make me make a beeline for the fresh air vents in the hotel room to let some outside air in and flush it out.

If they dialed it down a little so that it was subtle, like the way perfume should be worn, it might not be so bad. The way they pump it into the air right now, you’d think the hotel was a teenage boy slathering on the AXE.

By day, The Girlfriend attended her conference, while I did some work and research prepping for my new jobs (can’t talk about them now, but I will soon). When the sun went down — shockingly early since Vegas is on the easternmost edge of the Pacific Time Zone, which meant the sky was dark at 5 — we hit the restaurants and caught some Cirque du Soleil shows, which came at a deal because it was Cirque Week, the 20th anniversary of their shows on The Strip. Our package gave us Michael Jackson ONE, O, and Zumanity.

What smells nice, because Mother Nature doesn’t overdo her branding, are the gardens surrounding Mandalay Bay:

Meanwhile, across the street…

…things get considerably less expensive. I was just tagging along, which meant that my meals weren’t provided by the conference or covered by expense accounts, so the nearby cheap places that weren’t affiliated with hotels came in handy:

The hotels on this side of Las Vegas Boulevard don’t have all the glitz of the big resorts, but they do photograph well under the bright Nevada sun and have a charm all their own:

This could be the establishing shot for a Tarantino movie:

Or maybe Breaking Bad. The high-rent cars outside such a low-rent place scream “Rob Ford secret envelope exchange”, don’t they?