“In Carthage, nothing that results in profit is regarded as disgraceful.”
---Polybius, 2nd Century BC
“Much the same can be said of Vegas.”
---Me, 2025
There are mountains here everywhere, hundreds of mountains. I cannot go outside and NOT see mountains. The closest ones are bare and rocky and desert-like. In the distance they are snow-capped.
With the mountains all around, you also get a big sky that stretches over the entire basin that is Vegas. Sometimes it’s blue from one horizon to the other. More often, there are clouds tinted by shadows and sunlight into variegated streaks and puffs, and the colors change constantly in the afternoon as the sun drops behind the mountains. It’s quite beautiful and I’m trying to enjoy it because I know it’s going to start to piss me off any day now.
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In Uncle Vanya, or maybe it’s The Cherry Orchard, there’s a comic character who delivers a pompous dissertation on how much he misses his home. “In Moscow, I had a nephew and a cousin; here I have nothing. In Moscow, there are elephants at the zoo. Here, I have nothing.”
There are still times I feel like that guy. In Philadelphia, I had naked mole rats and half-price burger nights at Murphy’s and good Italian rolls and people walking around dressed like Betsy Ross---here I have nothing. Ah well….
Moving to a new city you know nothing about is fraught with things you don’t know, and you don’t even know you didn’t know them. Las Vegas, for example, has a highly competitive sushi restaurant scene with all-you-can-eat sushi available 24/7, with an infinite variety of rolls you’ve never seen before and fish species so strange that you are justifiably wary. I had no idea.
But try to find a cream donut.
The absence of cream donuts is something I never expected. The angel cream (NOT Bavarian!), donut covered in powdered sugar is a guilty pleasure I became hooked on at the age of four. They came from Hesh’s bakery on Castor Avenue in NE Philly, a bakery that disappeared late in the 20thCentury. But there were plenty of other bakeries that made cream donuts, including Dunkin and Krispy Kreme, and I’ve been eating them for the last seventy years.
As the fashion for “health food” began to spread across the fruited plain, my angel cream donuts became less and less morally acceptable, and I began (without consciously deciding), to sneak them. Few of my friends have ever seen me eat a cream donut. Even my wife is not aware of the full extent of this lechery because I would often grab one at Shoprite and inhale it before I got home with the rest of the groceries. I told myself I was sparing her the spectacle of my consumption. She doesn’t care to see food on my face and there’s no way to consume a cream donut without plastering your mug with powdered sugar, so I was doing her a favor. You see that, right? But it wasn’t true. I was hiding my cream donut vice from her. And now, in Vegas, I am unable to indulge at all. Karma, dude. It’s a bitch.
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For someone who has spent years driving the streets of Philadelphia, Las Vegas is a surprise.
We live in a residential area characterized by a grid of 4-lane streets that intersect at 4-way stop signs. People stop at these signs; they don’t roll through them. Everybody actually stops. In fact, if someone gets to their sign a half second before you, they will often sit there and let you go first. Being from Philly, I at first thought they were idiots. Then I realized they were being polite and obeying traffic laws. Imagine that.
I also don’t see cars driving six inches behind my bumper. And if you have the right of way, nobody cuts in front so you are forced to brake.
I am told people do dangerous things on the road downtown and near the casinos, especially after dark, and I don’t doubt there are crazy drunks in Las Vegas, but I don’t drive around the casinos late at night, so I never see them.
I attribute driving manners at least partly to the fact that Nevada is a “constitutional carry” state where a lot of normal people are packing, versus Philadelphia where most people who are armed are criminals because it’s so difficult for good citizens to carry a weapon legally. People tend to be more polite in a place like Vegas because there are so many guns on decent people’s hips. You would rather not piss anyone off.
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The cultural differences, like driving patterns, are the things you notice first when you move to a different city. Smoking, for example. There is more indoor smoking here because it is permitted in casinos and everyplace with a bank of slot machines is considered a sort of casino. Smoking is not as common as it was, of course, so you never encounter a smoke-filled room, even in Vegas, but I do like the smell of cigarette smoke when I encounter it. I think I still miss smoking from when I stopped twenty years ago. To me, the smell will always say “party.”
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There’s also more water-carrying in Las Vegas than I’m accustomed to. I have generally regarded people who carry a drinking liquid around with them with something less than esteem and respect. When I visited Joshua Tree, California this summer, where the daytime temperature was 110 degrees, my views on water-carrying changed a bit, and I now carry my own water in an insulated container. I’m not proud of it, and it’s not 110 degrees here, so I have no excuse. I often forget to take my water with me so maybe I’m conflicted. Am I forgetting my water bottle on purpose? Subconsciously? I mean---who the hell am I?
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There’s no recycling here. I wouldn’t know how to recycle my beer cans if I wanted to, though I assume there is a city program of some kind because they exist everywhere. People in the West routinely see vast expanses of nothing and conclude, quite reasonably---well, why can’t we just bury our beer cans in the desert? I suspect nobody west of the Mississippi was ever persuaded by the we’re-running-out-of-landfills scam of that EPA guy in 1990. They see that the world consists of little towns here and there, and then there are mountains and deserts and billions of acres of nothing, so the idea of recycling to save the planet just seems silly.
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Then there’s bicycle culture, and I apologize for injecting politics into this purely observational piece but it’s difficult to avoid when the subject of bicycles must be discussed. I confess I have strong feelings about members of the Bike Path Left, the maniacal partisans who often bear “SHARE THE ROAD” tattoos on their thighs and buttocks, who almost elected Howard Dean president in 2004, who only care about bikes and bike lanes, and who are only dimly aware of issues such as inflation, immigration, war, LGBT rights, the climate, and drug policy. I like the Bike Path Left less than I like communists, and I don’t like communists very much.
I’m intimately familiar with them from Philadelphia, of course, where they have dragooned hundreds of miles of city street acreage for lanes that may be traversed by two bikes per hour but collectively render the entire city undriveable by cars. The streets of downtown Philly were largely laid out in the 18th Century, so they weren’t very wide to begin with. Now, laced with bike lanes, they are half the size they once were.
We have hundreds of miles of bike lanes here in Vegas as well because---well, you know, because of climate change---but most streets in quiet residential neighborhoods are four (or even six), lanes wide, so the bike lanes are not nearly as annoying. They are even more ridiculous, however, because except for an hour or two per week, they are never used.
Though there is little point in Philly to cutting streets in half for bike lanes that serve no real purpose in moving people around, there are people who use them. It is possible to commute by bicycle from 10th and Wolf to your job in City Hall and there are probably three people who do that. Therefore, if you are a member of the Bike Path Left, those three people fully justify the $600 billion Philly has spent on bike lanes.
But nobody does that in Vegas. For one thing, you probably live on Lone Mountain Drive and your job is at the Red Rock Casino eighteen miles away, and you must wear your uniform to work, and for long stretches throughout the year, the ambient temperature is 106 degrees F. NOBODY rides a bike to work in Vegas.
So who uses the thousands of miles of bike lanes in Las Vegas?
The only time I see anyone on a bike is on Saturday morning when a crew of ten or twelve will pedal past you, all in their multi-colored Italian spandex. Then, by noon, they’re home again and the streets offer nothing but cars for another week.
Still, you know…climate change.
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A large proportion of residential housing in Las Vegas, including where we live, is found in gated communities with walls around them, making these communities difficult to distinguish from minimum-security prisons. There are hundreds of them, and they all have names designed to impress you with their all-consuming elegance. Here’s a few:
Enclave at Gold Rush
Legends
El Capitan Ranch
Durango Reserve
The Pueblo
Stone Canyon
Mariposa
Timberline
Big Horn
Desert Trace
Desert Creek
Copperhead Estates
Painted Desert
Sandstone Edge
Stone Canyon
Mar-a Lago
Cambria
Deerbrooke Estates
Cranston Ranches Estates
Tucson Trails
Grandview
Panorama
They are beige. The buildings and the walls are beige, and all the houses and condos are surrounded by the same red gravel, which comes from the Red Rock Canyon just outside of town. Millions of years created an iron-rich sandstone, and the red is from the rusting of the iron in the stone. Instead of lawns, there are 83 trillion tons of this red gravel on the ground in Las Vegas. Pretty at first, then monotonous.
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Cheap in Vegas: limes (but not lemons), avocadoes, booze, peppers, and beer.
Very expensive in Vegas (or impossible to find): Russian or Eastern European foods, tarragon (and other fresh herbs), and the nutmeg-adjacent spice called mace. Pork costs at least twice as much as it does in Philly. And I haven’t found a good loaf of bread.
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I got a library card here shortly after I arrived and, after living in Philly, was more than a little surprised by the rules and procedures. Late returns ARE NOT TOLERATED. For the evil-doers, there is a frightening array of fines, assessments, loss of privileges, and a “collection agency service fee.” I think eventually they send you to Guantanamo.
I always thought it was a mistake when the Free Library of Philadelphia abandoned late fees, and I think I was proven correct a few years later when shoplifting was also de-criminalized. Now, in Philly, most felonies are simply overlooked, and it is sort-of impolite even to mention them. It’s a slippery slope IMHO, and it starts with the elimination of overdue book fees.
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Music you hear frequently on classic rock stations in Las Vegas but never in Philadelphia: Meat Loaf.
Music you hear frequently on classic rock stations in Philadelphia but never in Las Vegas: The Beatles.
Copyright2026MichaelKubacki
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