I checked into my hotel for our annual sales and success kickoff quite early this morning — at around 11am. I was a little annoyed given that the front desk service was below subpar; she looked like she couldn’t care less about her job and barely made any eye contact with me. The woman said that they’d text me when my room was ready given it was so early. (I later told Chris this story. Given I was clearly complaining, he responded, “Sounds like a boomer.”) Maybe, but when you choose to work in hospitality, you should be… hospitable?!).

At around 3pm, I found out that a number of my colleagues had arrived and had already been given their room cards. Annoyed, I went back to the front desk and told a different front desk person what I was originally promised. He apologized profusely, then told me that while my booked room type wasn’t available, he’d upgrade me to a large top floor king room overlooking The Strip. This room was immediately available, so I could go to my room right away. I went up to my room and was pretty impressed: it was, indeed, a very large room with a huge bathroom, ample space throughout, and large floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking The Strip. I guess that situation ended up working out in my favor.

In between arriving and checking into my room, I was happy to see that a Famous Foods Street Eats Market, modeled after the Singaporean hawker food centers, had opened right here in Resorts World. The thought of having Hainanese chicken rice or laksa sounded quite tempting, so I made my way over there. Unfortunately, half of all the stalls were closed today through Thursday for Lunar New Year, so only a few desirable stalls remained open. I chose a claypot rice stall, which was fine, but it was a bit too greasy for my liking. At least they did do a decent job with the crispy rice bits.

While filling my water bottle with filtered tap water, I was abruptly reminded how terrible the tap water is here in Vegas. Even when I had hot tea (without milk), I could even taste how terrible and strange the water was through the tea flavor. Since then, I’ve decided to block out the awful water taste in tea by using black teas with milk only.

Las Vegas is a popular tourist destination year round, but around Lunar New Year, lots of Asian families love to come here to celebrate. And Vegas does do a good job getting decked out for the Lunar New Year: you can see endless Lunar New Year decorations everywhere here, with red lanterns, peach blossoms, and ornamental snakes given it’s the Year of the Snake. What’s also crazy is the type of gifts that are on display for purchase: you can buy extremely fancy, painstakingly handmade and decorated Lunar New Year butter and chocolate cookies for $88 (of course, it’s a lucky number with lots of 8s…), or even a solid gold snake statue for thousands of dollars and bring it home to grace your entry way!