The Las Vegas Strip. (Shutterstock)

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LAS VEGAS – You have entered an optic buffet, a feast for your pupils unlike any they have viewed. You will view a menu full of appetizers, entrees and desserts for your exploding optic signals.

Your senses have struck it rich with sights, sounds, smells, touch and tastes that are making you hungry and thirsty for more.

Energy savers beware, this is an electric city; power is everywhere and not all from the utilities.

Stiff-neckers need not attend. You’ll want to be a constant turkey-necker, turning for the delicious, delightful eye candy.

Don’t worry, you can get a neck massage, or you’ll be offered one, every 20 yards. You might even find one from a genuine massage therapist.

The Strip is Las Vegas Blvd., full of high buildings and high people. It has a surprising smattering of palm and pine trees but very little grass, at least the green type that grows on some of the resort grounds.

There is just more than five miles of hotels, resorts, gambling, entertainment and shopping from Cartier to outlet malls, street vendors to side streets.

There are bars and neon screens taller than your three-storey home, using more electricity than your city.

Las Vegas is Spanish for Meadows, but there are no meadows here. It is a man-made electronic oasis of concrete and lights in the middle of a desert where sin and over-indulgence are ignored.

It is a paradox, a contradiction; that sounds absurd, but it’s true. You are in Wonderland, and you are Alice.

Vegas is not for those who don’t like to walk. Sure, there is plenty of public transportation and more than 1,000 taxis but you’ll want to walk so wear comfortable shoes. Just walking from your hotel room to The Strip might give you blisters.

This is a people watching, and walking, place. You can be entertained for free, for 10 bucks or for all you’ve got to spend.

It is a city of images; entertainment capital of the world and the suicide capital of America (studies have shown this is NOT because people lose big at Vegas, but because they come here for their last hurrah).

It is the brightest, most unnatural place in the world with 15,000 miles of neon tubing on The Strip and downtown. Casinos spend $250,000 to $500,000 per month for electricity and yet Vegas yields some of the darkest views of society. It has more murders than most cities in America at 150 a year but most of those aren’t on The Strip – and it’s a far cry from Venezuela’s 14,000 annually.

It is a booming, bustling, cash and credit city with America’s worst unemployment at 14%.

It is sex and crime, high-end shopping and headliner shows. It is rich and it is poor.

But it is never boring.

Vegas is about tourism with more than 150,000 hotel rooms, more than anywhere in the world, charging an average room rate of just over $39. While we’re not aware anybody has done a study, we would wager there is also less sleeping in most of these rooms than anywhere in the world. Why waste time in Vegas when it’s open 24 hours a day?

It has nicknames, plenty of nicknames: Sin City, The Entertainment Capital of the World, Lost Wages, Gambling Mecca and the latest one, The Bone Yard, because so many buildings have been left uncompleted or not started.

Me? I like People’s Paradise.

People come here for conventions, vacations, betting, business, shopping, drinking, eating and fun.

And don’t think for a moment that it’s a city without religion. More than 83% of the residents say they are religious and there are more than 80 churches of all faiths.

While gambling and shows get the entertainment attention, shopping is an art form. Walk into any hotel and you’re going to find shopping. Vegas also has 150 outlet stores you can get to by bus, everything from Calvin Klein to Cole Haan and Tag Heuer.

There are pawnshops, kiosks, discount stores and flea markets, but you won’t find too many on The Strip.

It’s a transient city. Ask 38 consecutive people who live there where they are from. Go ahead, ask anyone: police, bankers, casino workers, housekeepers, chefs, taxi drivers and restaurant employees. I did and they were from California, New York, New Jersey, Canada, Europe, Bulgaria, England, Paris, Mexico and Asia . . . but not one from Vegas. It’s a city of transplants that has doubled its population in 21 years with what locals call a 21-year building boom that has tanked.

Statistics show 22% of the population came from somewhere else, the highest rate in America.

While much of its poverty appears hidden, 10 miles away you can see vagrants lining the street outside homeless shelters. You will even see a few on the overhead bridges crossing The Strip but they will be playing guitars, bagpipes, fiddles and violins, and holding signs stating:

“I’ll take your wife or your money” or “I’m just being honest, I need some money for a beer.”

More than 100,000 people work at casinos, where more than $160 billion is spent annually. They are serving all day and all night through the second-hand cigar and cigarette smoke of the gamblers among the constant pinball beat of the slot machines. Most of the gambling is slots and video. There is also sports book, the only place you can bet on any sporting game in the world (where we bet on the Habs to beat the Leafs and lost).

Many of The Strip’s visitors will never hit the downtown, saying they are too busy or not even familiar with a downtown area some seven miles past The Strip.

Besides, your time is spent taking in The Strip scenery.

Hey there’s Mickey Mouse, Gene Simmons, Michael Jackson, Superman, Star Wars characters and a fat man dressed as a showgirl.

They are all here looking for your cash if you want to drop some money in their cans or hands or even get your picture taken. Look out for Simmons though, his tongue is a very ugly purple and fake.

You are usually looking up so you don’t instantly see the daily litter on the sidewalks – handouts of topless “babes” pictured on small cards given to anyone, and everyone, who wants to know where and how to “get the babes.”

Are you with your wife? Don’t worry, they will hand you one. With your husband? Don’t worry you won’t be left out.

There are coupon books, deals for trips to Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon deals. Deals, deals, deals. There is more dealing done on the street than at the card tables. OK, maybe not.

But one deal you better not make is with the hookers. It is a myth that prostitution is legal or even regulated in Las Vegas.

Police officers say any city of 250,000 or fewer can apply to have prostitution regulated and legalized but Las Vegas doesn’t fit that category with close to two million people. Prostitution is not as obvious as it is even in some Canadian cities, at least not when you’re walking The Strip.

If you’re not into searching for deals it’s going to cost you $10 for a burger and $5 to $8 for a beer at most of the restaurants. The old days of cheap beer and food in Vegas are over. Cabbies tell us the locals won’t use The Strip too often for drinks and food because of the costs but you can find a happy hour almost any hour.

You don’t see many drunks until later in the night, although drinking starts as soon as you wake up. You can stroll The Strip with your beer or vodka and orange juice in hand at 5 a.m., 10 a.m., any time of day or night. The police won’t bother you unless you’re bothering someone. Few people are bothered.

While Vegas’s unemployment rate is high you don’t see too many signs of it. The Strip is for the “beautiful” baby boomers who have cash in their wallets and are willing to open them.

Jaywalking is a major no-no carrying $90 fines and there is a good reason: if you jaywalk on The Strip you could be carried off The Strip. Hundreds of thousands of cars roll along it daily, everything from Bentleys, Jags and limos stretching longer than three Cadillacs to buses and advertising vehicles. There are more than 1,000 taxis and 330 limos in Vegas taking people to all those hotel rooms, which include nine of the 10 largest hotels in the world.

It is The Strip that attracted more than 36 million visitors last year to a city that in 1980 had a population of 469,362 but by 2009 had hit 1,952,040. In the same period visitor volume went from 11.9 million to

36.3 million. Back in 1970 there were just 6.7 million visitors, but that was long before the billion-dollar casino resorts were built on acres of deserted land or locations where worn-out hotels had once stood.

This is the world of advertising and marketing, everything from young men with sandwich boards to lowlifes with the sex pamphlets. From the guy trying to make a buck selling you tickets, and directing you to clubs, to the passing trucks with the signs continuously telling you where you can “order your babes.”

Look up, look down, look sideways, close your eyes; advertising is everywhere with every gimmick known to mankind blazing out at you day and night.

It’s 10 p.m. on Friday night. The crowds will get bigger as the city edges toward the weekend but there are tens of thousands of people along The Strip. Still, you don’t feel crowded. Crowded is waiting in a line at Pearson International.

There is plenty of room for walking on the extra wide sidewalks. And for the most part it’s a friendly crowd. We see no fights and only the odd person who has consumed beyond their limit. This is mainly a crowd of tourists, many of them here for the National Finals Rodeo. It seems every 50th person is wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a cowboy or cowgirl hat.

There are familiar names: Planet Hollywood, Paris, Caesars Palace, Cosmopolitan, Treasure Island, The Imperial, The Palace, The Rio, Wynns, MGM, Harley Davidson. Every building is another feast.

You’ll find a CSI museum, even though none of the Las Vegas CSI series is filmed here.

Sure, there is gambling but most visitors who answer monthly Vegas surveys say they don’t come to gamble. However when they leave the majority say they did do some gambling.

Many come for the quality of shows featuring everything from Cirque du Soleil’s seven different productions to the little clubs hiding in the back of these massive entertainment shopping malls. You might see male and female strip shows, listen to every kind of music from country to rock to rap to show tunes to classical, or drink beer at places owned by celebrities like country star Toby Keith.

The food starts at burgers and goes up and the people preparing it range from grill flippers to world-class chefs.

One cowboy bar, Coyote Ugly, inside New York New York has people lined up for two-for-one beer specials or $2 drafts. Waitresses in their skimpiest clothes stand on the bars but beware, smoking is allowed and you can’t last long unless you’re a smoker or impaired. The doorman at the free-admission bar checks everyone’s ID, everyone’s. You ask why and he says they just want to see your pretty face. The drinking age is 21 but asking people in their late 50s for ID seems ridiculous.

Smoking is allowed in most places in Vegas but not restaurants or hotel lobbies. Most of the hotels have smoking-floor rooms.

We don’t see any people carrying guns in holsters even though it is legal to own and to carry.

As much as you’d like to sit in the Cabo Wabo outside patio, at $7 a pint, $6 for a bottle of water and $13 for a cheeseburger your Canadian common sense, and wallet, say no. OK, maybe for one beer since it’s the corner of a great people-watching spot across from the Bellagio and beside Planet Hollywood with plenty of sidewalk traffic. Besides, there are no Tim Hortons here.

Tourists are the ones walking the street; the locals are the ones working. There is a police presence in cruisers and on bicycles but you seldom notice them and they don’t bother many people.

Shows are everywhere: Blue Man Group, Seinfeld, Cher, Chris Angel, Clint Black, Miranda Lambert, Boyz ll Men and even Canadian icon Leonard Cohen. The Black Crowes are playing and so is Celine Dion, along with Elvis and Sinatra impersonators in places new and old – Caesars, The Flamingo, Golden Nugget, Harrahs, The Mirage, MGM, and Hard Rock Hotel. There are high rollers and low rollers, everything from musicians to magicians and at the other end of the spectrum girls, girls, girls.

There is also culture, Vegas style.

You can visit everything from a fine art gallery in the Bellagio featuring Picasso and Renoir to a mob museum.

Vegas is not for everyone, but it is well worth seeing. You’ll either never come back or keep coming back. You can’t possibly take it all in on a four-day trip.

How expensive is it?

It’s as expensive as you wish, or as inexpensive as you want. We had the $5 slice at a local pizzeria that’s as good as most and we had the $75 Norwegian salmon with wine and salad that would knock your socks off. We also had the $9 cheeseburger that was to big too finish.

There wasn’t a meal we didn’t like. The salmon at Olives on the outside terrace overlooking the dancing fountain at the Bellagio was superior.

Tickets to a Cirque du Soleil show start at $50 while headliners will cost you $60 and more.

It’s up to you how much you want to spend and how you want to live; even in the casinos you can play penny slots or get into a craps or card game where the sky is the limit.

The cost is much like the city; a paradox, a rather contradictory place, to say the least.