Civilization

Las Vegas is full of proud people coming to spend thousands of dollars shopping and gambling, what could be considered as a sign of the economic glory of the United States. For me is a decadence symptom of our present civilization.

Nevertheless, leaving the social and environmental perspectives on the side, it's incredible how anyone could ever imagine building a city here. During the drive to Vegas, long before we reached the city, we drove through a very hostile desert; one of the more inhospitable ones I have seen apart from the one at the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt (very beautiful to see though). While exploring a little bit I went up to the twentieth floor of the hotel we are staying at, which in fact is the nineteenth because there is no thirteen floor due to a superstition that most of the people don't really know about or understand but accept (just as most things in life are), I found myself looking at an astonishing landscape with big mountains, some of them with a strong red color tone I haven’t seen before. The entire city is surrounded by mountains that can be seen in the distance with their peaks covered by snow. The city itself is magnificent.

Imagining this greatness in where once was a harsh desert with no water and no more vegetation than small thorny bushes allow us to witness how far the human civilization have gone to. For some people (even for me before I started to worry so much about the environment, the contradictions and the injustices of this world) this place could be the closest way of experiencing what visitors felt when they first saw cities like Luxor, Rome, Tenochtitlan, Paris, Machu-Pichu, Agra, the Vatican, the Mecca etc. in their period of apogee. Seeing those places today is still a great experience but you are witnessing a passed period of glory (and in some cases, like for Tenochtitlan, history had other plans).