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2025: Vegas Baby!

Due to a great situation, I was able to go to Las Vegas, Nevada, for almost nothing! I will not be posting photos of myself or the people I went with, although they really were the whole reason I enjoyed the trip. As the homeless man outside of Burger King once told me, it's about the people, not the places!

After experiencing the most turbulence I have ever felt, we landed. It was fun figuring out how to navigate the airport and seeing the sheer number of people entering town. The last time I saw that many people was easily before COVID. After one of my friends got into a slight verbal disagreement with the Uber driver, we went to the best Italian restaurant… Buca di Beppo. The food was a solid 6/10, but I was so hungry that it didn’t matter. We had enough leftovers for the weekend, although we ate almost none of them.



Instead of driving to the hotel, we opted to walk down the strip. On the way, we were yelled at by multiple homeless people, and we even had a guy sitting on the curb telling us to have a great night. I hope he is doing well. After we made it to the hotel room, we opened the blinds and saw the sphere. It was insane to see in person, and the size was incomprehensible.



After exploring the inside of the hotel, we walked around the strip until very late. We got some drinks from CVS and ended up with a large group in our tiny hotel room. We were about ten deep, and someone knocked on our door, probably a noise complaint. We opened the door, and no one was there. After settling down, we heard another knock, and yet again, no person. This continued for a while until we finally saw someone opening their door. We asked, “You want some shots?” and got a hell yeah back.



By the end of the night, we had fourteen people in our hotel room, and it was getting deafeningly loud. We ended up splitting up again and tried our hand at gambling. If I remember correctly, I went to sleep at about 2 AM. The following morning, I made it a point to go out and buy food and water as early as possible to prevent getting a migraine.



We spent time in the pool as a group, which was quite nasty but really fun. The heat was brutal, and we returned to the hotel room to check out some conferences. A group presented a virtual reality (VR) project, but they knew little about the simulation as they didn’t make it, and their research was more of a project to show that people could use VR for training. Many people’s posters had tons of errors, which was quite surprising, but to be fair, my class load focused more on the research side of psychology.



Someone from our group was dying to check out some of the other hotels, so we spent time checking out the cool exhibits and designs. The overall architecture and size of the buildings are incredible, and it was easy to forget how deep you were in a building. Along the way back to the hotel room, we tried to take a shortcut through another hotel. This was a mistake. We had walked for about 10 minutes only to find out we were completely lost and had to return. The problem was, when we tried to go back, we ended up in a completely random spot. This led us to try to cut through with Google Maps, and we walked around for another 10-15 minutes. When we got up the escalator, we were right back in the middle of the hotel. It took us an embarrassing amount of time to make it outside.



Afterwards, I met up with another group and hung out with them in their room before hitting the slot machines. I put in about $20 and thought it would be a good idea to go big or go home. It took about 10 minutes for me to lose all my money. I ended up splitting off and tucking in for the night, again at about 3 AM. It was about 6:30 AM, I was awake and needed to prepare for our presentation. I attended a conference talk that was well done. As a group, we got coffee and ate some food before presenting. It was a little nerve-racking at first, but in the end, I realized that I was knowledgeable about our project and there was almost nothing anyone could ask to throw me off. We had some people genuinely interested, inspiring people like that was really cool.

After the conference, we attended our professor's talk and left for our flight. This was the first time I had traveled without family, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know some of my peers better. Definitely had a great time!