The best thing about Las Vegas

Is that they serve Pepsi products.  When I wanted something to drink with my quesadillas or hamburger (my dinners while I was there), I got to have Pepsi.  Not Coke, not Sprite because I didn't want to drink Coke.  I got Pepsi.  And that, folks, was the one highlight of Las Vegas.  I know they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I just had to share.

I spent the last three days at the Rio in Vegas for a conference of multicultural educators.  It's a conference that includes practitioners, teacher educators, and researchers all in one (not especially common in the field) and, in part because of its multicultural membership, has a unique vibe -- slam poetry between plenary sessions, a Shabbat blessing before the awards dinner, African carvings presented to the award recipients.  Just not the common scene at the conferences I've been to.  And, for that very reason, rather refreshing.  I get funded for two conferences in my first year, and I don't have to be presenting at either.  After the first year, funding for conferences in dependent upon my being first or second author on a paper.  So I wanted to use my funding this year.  Unfortunately, the conferences that most made sense for me to go to were in mid-December and mid-February, about 4 weeks before and 4 weeks after my due date -- not great times for traveling.  My advisor, however, was receiving an award at this conference and thought it might make sense for me to go.  There were a dozen or so "big names" in the field there, and he's in a position now where he knows these people and could introduce me (which he did).  So I decided to go.

There's a reason, though, that most people don't travel alone, seven months pregnant, to Las Vegas.  There's the alcohol, the late shows, the second hand smoke.  Add to that someone who has no plans to gamble and is rather put off by women in lingerie serving alcohol in public spaces (or, well, women in lingerie doing almost anything in public), and Las Vegas was about the worst place I could've gone.  It's not that I have something against the town.  Well, okay, I guess I do.  I find rather objectionable the sense of hedonism that is ingrained in the town.  But I'm smart enough to realize there is (I sincerely hope) more to it than that.  It was just that, traveling alone and without a way to get around town, and without anyone I knew in town to show me the backside of the city (or the front side, maybe in my mind), it just came off kind of dirty.  But then, maybe that was just all the smoke.

There was something a little strange to me about having a multicultural educators conference there.  On the one hand, Vegas is perhaps the place where being different is almost a requirement for fitting in, which supports the inclusive nature of multicultural education.  On the other hand, the nature of the economy and the chauvinistic, sexist practices at play as part of it seemed incongruous with the organization's goals -- like having a cardiologist's convention at a Krispy Kreme.

So like I said, nothing personal against Las Vegas.  It's just not my kind of town.  I think I'm more a DC, Asheville, Denver, Portland, Seattle kind of person.  Even Chicago.  But the Pepsi -- now that I liked.