Never Sleeps

Hello!

I just got back from a conference in Las Vegas. The conference itself was for Student Unions (or what our campus calls "Campus Center"), called ACUI. It's basically a 3-day session-packed conference and a great reason to go places and network with people in other campuses doing the same things that you're doing to benefit your Student Union. I left Hawai'i with a chest cold, so I was pretty miserable the first few days there. I wasn't really digging the Vegas vibe. I don't like to gamble, I don't have a thing for Hookers, and although there were half-naked girls walking around all over the place it just felt really dirty. When my sinuses finally cleared and I WAS able to smell things, I suddenly realized that the entire city smelled like one huge burning cigarette, which made me sneeze fanatically for a few days. We had the first day off, so we took advantage of this and went all over the strip. During the night time, we went wandering over to the MGM and then through Paris. We had this great idea to go up the Eifel tower and to watch the Bellagio Fountains.

It looked amazing. My eyes had not been so contempt since New York. We decided, though, that we needed to experience the fountains from down below. We hastily headed down towards the strip in front of Bellagio and waited for the show to start. As Celine Dion's voice began to mumble strange Italian words from "Time to Say Goodbye" I fell in love. The fountains left me speechless, and as the final pressure blast from the larger circle shot up following Bocelli's finale I felt a deep love for this place which renewed my passion.



Anyway, from that point on, I had a pretty great time in Vegas. I gambled, I lost, I stopped gambling.

The keynote speaker for the conference was an advocate of the Pay it Forward movement and showed a great clip that I had not seen before from the Free Hugs Campaign

All in all, it was definitely a positive experience.