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  Bonnie Chau Chau is a second-year English student. E-mail her at bchau@media.ucla.edu. Click Here for more articles by Bonnie Chau

I never really knew Vegas before Spring Break. Sure, I played a few Circus Circus games when I was small, traipsed through the requisite casinos, stared at the white tigers and wandered around gift shops before swimming in extravagant hotel pools. But I never really knew Vegas until now. And even those several days in Vegas were not enough, I’m sure, to give me real knowledge.

But I know now that Vegas is another world. It is a gigantic fun zone in the middle of nowhere, a hot, dry stretch of noise and light and movement – and more people over the age of 60 than one would think possible. For all the hype surrounding the alcohol, the clubs, the strippers and the prostitution, Vegas really ought to cater more effectively to its younger vacationers.

It seems like for every person having a “Fear and Loathing”-type time, there are about two million elderly men and women over the age of sixty wearing ill-fitting clothes and permanently slumped at slot machines. These are the same people who give us dirty looks on the monorail when they overhear us talk of controlled substances, who rudely cut in line at those buffets possessing wide varieties of sliced meat and pies and cakes and where you sporadically look up to see a strange woman hovering next to you yelling.

Younger people occupy a very tiny corner of a part of a section of Vegas. Most of the showgirls and cocktail waitresses, after all, look over the age of 50 at least. There are the college kids on break, the 20-something professionals on vacation, the UNLV kids and the young drifters. But these account for only the most fractional percentage of the Vegas population.

And how deep into Vegas can we get? For those of us not privy to the prestige of high roller rooms, we see none of the elegant ladies and posh gentlemen. For us, the gambling masses consist of $2 and $5 blackjack tables overcrowded with people who either look like strange petty criminals or tourists having crawled out of the plains of Kansas to partake in the festivities that are Las Vegas.

Stumbling around the streets at 10 or 11 in the morning, siphoning our margaritas by the yard out of those colored plastic things, I’m sure a lot of vacationing parents pulled their children closer to them and farther away from us drunken messes. College kids like us are relegated to living 11 to a bedroom. We must sleep three to a bed (and allow for incidents like the person sleeping on the edge falling out of bed and onto the person sleeping on the floor). We must stick close to someone who has one of the two room keys. We must steal piles and piles of towels from the pool and jacuzzi stashes outside for our bathroom use. In the hotel gift shops, we must deal with cashiers who insist upon seeing everyone’s ID since the alcohol we are purchasing is “more than one serving,” and in hotel lounges we must deal with bartenders who call security on us when we are simply enjoying the live band because we’re in an “alcohol and gambling establishment.” You don’t say. We must deal with condescension, the always-looming possibility of getting kicked out, and losing money we don’t have.

But somehow dealing with all these things doesn’t really matter in the end. If you think about it logically, it seems like at any given moment, the majority of the population of Vegas must be losing money, and therefore the dominant mood should be pretty damn depressed. But it is a testimony to the greatness of the human spirit that we can rise nonetheless, amid all the annoying restrictions, smoke fumes and unsavory characters to discover the strange beauty that is Las Vegas.