What's in a name? The Imperial Palace

The last time I went to Las Vegas, I had the fortune of staying in a timeshare leased by my fiance's parents. It was commodious, clean, and quiet with a beautiful view of the Las Vegas desert in the not-too-far distance. (In case you're wondering, we stayed at Hilton's Grand Vacations Club adjacent to the Las Vegas Hilton). The drawbacks to the timeshare were the same as its principal advantages: there was no casino and no massive crush of crowd that you'd experience at strip hotels like the Paris. It was like a monastic oasis, yet it was easily accessible to the Las Vegas Hilton (and therefore the monorail down to the strip).

On this latest vacation, though, we decided to go on the cheap. I'm not too sure I'd advise doing Las Vegas on the cheap. It rightfully conjures images of dead prostitutes shoved under your mattress or of seedy, middle-aged men leering drunkenly at you as they lurk at the run-down bar next to the elevators to your room.

We managed to book a room at the Imperial Palace for $83 a night- not a bad rate for the height of tourist season and for a hotel located literally in the middle of the strip. We got to the hotel around midnight, and then began our historic wait in line. After an hour and a half of standing and staring at the hotel's seemingly last two employees, we were told that we had two options for our pre-booked room: either we take a room in the motel behind the IP, in which case we would indeed get a nonsmoking room but would not get the two double-beds we had requested (weeks before), OR we take a smoking room in the basement. We chose the latter option for lack of a better one.

The hotel is poorly laid out, even by Las Vegas standards. We were dropped off by the taxi in the back of the hotel, and it took us twenty minutes to find the front desk. By some miracle of modern engineering, we took an elevator up to the second floor, then got on a different elevator to go down to the first (as instructed), only to end up precisely where we had started. (Note: there is a secret bank of elevators behind the main elevators that never gets crowded. If you're foolish enough to stay at the IP, or if you're only using a room by the hour like most of the IP's clientele, use these elevators).

The room itself didn't smell too bad, although we had to walk through more than one stink cloud to get there. In the middle of the night, when the other guest stagger back to their rooms and light up one last smoke for the night, the stench wafts in and begins to choke you.

Our view was phenomenal in its awfulness. We were nearly subterranean, so there was a massive air conditioning unit outside our window. If I peered hard enough and craned my neck to the right, I could catch a glimpse of a portion of the building's exterior- a few balconies overlooking the pool.

The shower screamed and had all sorts of calcifications crusted to the shower head. The air conditioning unit had few controls, so the room was frigid and draughty. The lighting in the room consisted of two 60-watt light bulbs- not too bad if you're only there for an hour or two.

Thankfully there were no dead prostitutes under the mattress.

Perhaps I'm being cruel. After all, this isn't just another forum for ranting about an unpleasant experience. I could go to TripAdvisor for that, right?

This all leads me to think about the power of naming- what's in a name?

The Imperial Palace- of course an Oriental reference, but taken out of context the name is just as intriguing. Las Vegas is in itself an exercise in imperialism, as anyone who has ever been there could easily tell you. Look at the names and themes of the hotels, imperial powers all: Caesar's Palace, New York, New York, the Paris, the Luxor, Excalibur, Hooters (can't you take a joke?). Then there is the branding of imperialism on the buildings and in the stores: Hilton, Trump, Bally's (the model for Dodgeball's tellingly named Globo-Gym), Tiffany's, Cartier, Prada. Not an explicitly governmental sort of imperialism, certainly, but no less potent for that. Imperialism conjures great power, and who doesn't want to be around greatness? Imperial? Sign me up! Palace, as in an abode of royalty. As in the great pyramid, or Le Tour Eiffel, or the Colosseum. Las Vegas has imperially appropriated all of civilization's greatest imperial achievements in miniature. What could be more imperial than that? Las Vegas has out-palaced everyone. Take that, Queen Elizabeth.

Staying at the Imperial Palace, though, I didn't feel great or on top of the world. I could veritably feel the achievements of civilization crumbling all around me (lots of crumbling on this trip, apparently). A misnomer to the core. I was the one who had been conquered, appropriated, enslaved like chattel as I waited in a motionless queue. A facade of greatness. What could be more American than that? Standing in the Imperial Palace, you could feel the walls begin to shake from the impending implosion. I felt like the statue of Ozymandias in the desert, covered with sand, uselessly proclaiming the wonders of my vanished civilization. Las Vegas in the distant future, just dust and sand.