A week in a foreign city - part 1

 A 3-day conference in a foreign city - Crown Casino.

 Food in the restaurants was consistently amazing, and frequently unethical (especially threatened species of seafood). On the day I couldn't take the kids to dinner, we ended up at the food court, with the following choices: Maccas, Subway or KFC.

 Ambient temperature is 24 degrees. I tried very hard to stop thinking about the energy cost of heating the whole place (evidenced by the enormous fans & pipes & heat exchangers, visible from the glass wall in the hotel room, and running between presumably very exclusive architectural gardens on the roof)  It was very hard to get ourselves together to leave the toasty warm t-shirt building to go into the cold wind outside, and there was no temperature variation to give you a sense of the day passing. I expect they make a lot of money on that.

I am told the whole complex is riddled with secret passageways and hidden panels. If the CCTV watchers see anyone, for example, have a stroke and fall off their pokies stool, or collapse in a nightclub, a panel can slide out and the staff can whisk them away in a moment, nobody else has to look at the corpse. The staff came and went like ghosts, silent, fast, always friendly, all below-average height and caramel skinned and good looking but not too good looking, and all dressed in dark grey. We never saw them except when you needed something (a glass of water, madam?) and then they were at our elbow. And then gone.

A nice shiny brochure in the room tells me that Crown is one of the largest private employers of Aboriginal Australians, with something close to 1/5 of their 10,000 employees Aboriginal. I thought they were evil until I read that. Now I am thinking hard about good and evil.


I am left with the sense that Crown sells exclusivity. If someone comes in off the street, they eat KFC and only get into a few small areas - and a view of the shiny gold tiles in the Members Lounge. Coming in with a hotel booking, a holiday package or a conference, your key opens a few luxury pools, gets you a discount at a flame-seared-tuna-on-wasabi-guacamole-with-watercress-garnish type restaurant, and lets you see the exclusive rooftop garden. As a pro golfer with an entourage, you can get whisked from one spot to another never even knowing about the food court and feeling like you are the king of the universe as those bloody gas firework things puff a ton of carbon into the atmosphere every hour, on the hour, outside your own suite's toilet window.

Still thinking about good and evil. Mostly about evil - the evil already in the hearts of the profligate rich.