Bernadette’s report from Las Vegas

My wife has returned from a reunion of former Kunia pineapple workers. The reunion, like all Hawaii reunions, was held in Las Vegas. It’s the law.

No, it’s not the law, but it’s the practice, and indeed we can be more specific and say the practice is to stay in downtown Las Vegas rather than on the Strip. So many kama’aina do this that the California Hotel can no longer handle all the Hawaii crowd and it has spilled over to two other nearby hotels.

Bernadette brought back some interesting observations, having not been to Vegas for a few years:

There is never any seating to simply watch people gamble; they want you to gamble, too.
If you find a Starbucks and sit quietly at the sidewalk, passersby treat you as a show, like monkeys at the zoo.
A lot of really fat mainlanders come to Vegas and ride around on motorized carts, though they can walk.
The cigarette haze in the older places with ordinary air circulation is enough to sicken even a smoker.
If you travel in a group, you don’t do much, because it’s like herding cats to gain consensus and mobilize to go anywhere.
Don’t give a flight attendant a friendly warning that a family member is feeling queasy because the attendant will try to kick you off the plane by reporting the queasiness as a “serious illness.”
Some Hawaii ex-pats who have lived in Vegas for a few years begin to lose their aloha and act like everybody else on the mainland.