Viva las Vegas

I try to act green. A little. When it’s not too difficult. Nor to expensive. Nor too weird. But here I am, probably in the most excessive anti-ecological city on Earth, with humongous whimsically shaped hotels, beautiful fountains in the middle of the desert and millions of neon lights illuminating the hordes of smoking gamblers, buffet eating tourists, bachelor(ette) party going twentysomethings and working girls… My hotel room is awesome, by the way. My handicapped friendly bathroom (the size of my bedroom back in the city) has the mongo shower and the low-rise bathtub. So this morning, given the fact that I can’t engage in juicier more interesting sins in Sin City, I opted for a little anti-ecologic misdeed: taking a bubble bath.

For some reason foam baths remind me of a Farah Fawcett soap ad that used to air in Spain back in the seventies. As you can imagine my bald, hairy, out of shape, crutch toting self has very little to do with any the Charlie’s angels, including homely Sabrina, never mid bomb shell Jill. But comparisons aside, I decided to do something I’d never do at home and go for the foamy dip.

So here’s the conclusion: in terms of fun, wellbeing or pleasure, to me taking a bath is roughly equivalent to pulling my nose hair out and barely better than doing my physical therapy exercises: a pain in the ass (a little like another overrated ‘wellness’ activity: getting a not happy ending type of massage, boring and/or painful).

You start by filling up the tub, dumping the hotel provided salt and soap and waiting. Of course you forget about it and provoke a little flood you try to soak with your hotel towels (another green no-no). By the time it seems ready, the water is scalding hot, your testing hand seems to have heat-enduring superpowers that the rest of your body lacks. You man it up and jump in anyways. ‘This is how lobsters must feel’ is the first thought that crosses your mind when you finally lie in the damn thing. Sweat appears on your forehead, you start adding cold water, provoke a second flood and hit your head against a wall a couple of times, all while doing Cirque du Soleil worthy contortions with your legs trying in vain to keep most of your body under the water.

And then it happens: those 10 seconds when the temperature is right, there are some dollops of foam sailing around your chest hair and you kind of say to yourself, ok, this is why you go through all that preparation. Problem is, it is 10 seconds. OK, a minute maybe. After that the thing starts feeling cold. Back to tampering with the water tap, adding, draining, testing… And at that point you realize you are swimming in your own dirty water. Yuck. With your dangerously stiff only working leg you get up as fast as you can, open the tap this time in the nozzle mode and take a beautiful shower to get rid of all that nasty bath water… It feels so damn good to act green.