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A few more Vegas photos, this time some night pics of the Mandalay Bay Resort, down at the south end of the Strip.
This is mostly an ooh-purty photo post, but a quick note on the name of the hotel, since I do kind of have to dig at least a little deeper. The name comes from a Kipling poem, "Mandalay". It's not a very good poem if you ask me, but then I never liked Kipling. Perhaps this yarn of a colonial British soldier pining for the exotic Orient will speak to you in ways it doesn't to me.
So we can argue about Kipling's crimes against literature, but there's no room for debate about his offenses against geography. There is an actual city of Mandalay, the second largest in Burma/Myanmar. But it's located in the center of the country and has no bay of any kind, much less the east-facing one Kipling yammers on about.
FWIW, the king and queen mentioned in the poem ruled from Mandalay until they were deposed and exiled by the invading British army, which then proceeded to loot the city.
The hotel's quite nice, in any event.
Also: I've been unable to discover what these winged Dinotopia-esque beasties are supposed to be. There's no obvious dino or lizard theme in the rest of the property, unless you count the Komodo dragons in the Shark Reef Aquarium. In any case this page has a few nice photos of them. Whatever the hell they are.
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