Informally, the (incoherent) explanation they give is that they see Germans as basically against Erdogan, and integration of ethnic Turkish people into German society has not been great, so you can't tell me what to think.
Another possibility; Erdogan is basically the candidate of the conservative, religious, nationalist, rural Turks; the liberal secular urban Turks are pretty much his enemy. I admit I don't know which parts of Turkey the German-Turkish community come from, but I would guess that the sort of communities who send their young people abroad to work are generally poor and rural. So German Turks are, or are descended from, people from Erdogan-voting backgrounds?
Maybe they figure fascism worked pretty well for Germany, so long as you weren't living in Germany from 1939 to 1945, and figure the same could work for Turkey?
That is, so long as you were part of the dominant ethnic group also.
AFAIK German Turks come from the Anatolian peninsula (so yes, poor and rural).
It's extremely common for diasporic communities to be much more conservative and nationalist than those still in the country. You see this with Taiwan, and other places as well.
3
The Turks also have a pretty problematic relationship to genocide and minority rights in general.
It's only problematic if you have ethics.
It's extremely common for diasporic communities to be much more conservative and nationalist than those still in the country. You see this with Taiwan, and other places as well.
...such as America?
By the way, which diasporic community are you thinking of in Taiwan? Do the Taiwanese themselves count as diasporic? (And are they really more conservative and nationalistic than mainland Chinese?)
Doesn't KMT mean "Chinese Nationalists"?
AFAIK German Turks come from the Anatolian peninsula (so yes, poor and rural).
This must be a geographic term I'm not familiar with, as I would have assumed it meant all of Turkey, or so much to make it not very determinative (all except European Turkey and the Armenian Highlands).
10 yeah. The Anatolian interior is what everyone's referring to.
9: Actually it just means "Nationalist". The Chinese is implied.
It's like how "Long Island" means only "the parts of Long Island that aren't called Queens or Brooklyn except when it does mean those."
It pretty much means "not European Turkey or Istanbul, and not the Armenian highlands or Kurdistan, and really we don't count Ankara either". IIRC about 20% of the Turkish population lives in Istanbul, and another 10% or so are Kurds and other non-Turkish types. But, yes, doesn't narrow it down much.
7/8
I meant Taiwanese Nationals living in Canada/America are diasporic, and they are far more likely to vote for the Nationalist candidate than Taiwanese in Taiwan. This is something Taiwanese Taiwanese are sort of resentful of. IIRC at least 10-15 years ago Israelis in America are also more likely to vote in a way that would start a nuclear Iran than Israelis in Israel.
IIRC this is true of almost any diasporic community that still has voting rights in its home country. Some of this is people have warm fuzzy nostalgic feelings for the Motherland that triggers conservatism, and some of it is the demographics of who gets to leave (e.g. Iran, Cuba, the USSR).
Since this thread appears to have taken root, I'm going to post my other post before heading to teach.
And other thoughts I probably didn't need to bother saying out loud.
15:
the demographics of who gets to leave
This is curious. Excluding refugees, migrants are necessarily those rich enough to travel. "Rich enough" could mean asshole millionaires, but it could also mean middle-class, educated and cosmopolitan.
Immigrants in the US have tended to vote Democratic, which for much of US history makes blanket generalization tricky because of the whole north/south urban/rural thing. On the other side you had antislavery and anti-immigration together.
When you say Nationalist in Taiwan, do you mean the party or do you mean for independence? My relatives there seemed more pro-independence than relatives here, but there was an election coming up when I visited and everyone was trying not to talk about it because there were some strong disagreements. My more immediate relatives were less involved in politics than the more distant ones.
21: The terminology is pan-blue (KMT and other pro-unification) and pan-green (pro-independence), presumably for this reason.
14 You'd also have to exclude Izmir.
Well, 21 is a good point - the KMT are the "Nationalist" party by name, but they aren't the pro-independence one. They are, I suppose, the more conservative one? They're centre-right and the DPP is centre-left. Given how weird Taiwan's setup is I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about a nationalist party.
Willing to carry on like you didn't lose a war that ended 70 years ago is pretty conservative.
19: also true. I think you have to make a distinction between political refugees and economic migrants. Never mind Iran; I don't think you could argue that the German diaspora in 1930s Europe was more conservative than the average German (not least because it was in large part a German-Jewish diaspora). The fact that they weren't was why they were leaving.
24 last: It does; the DPP is Taiwanese nationalist. But given the history the term just isn't useful.
There are enough Kurdish Turks in Germany that strife between competing Turkish and Kurdish demonstrations happens every couple of years.
26: The stats are for shit, but it seems that S. African emigres are disproportionately Anglophone, and relatively left-leaning.
29: again, potentially more of a political emigration than an economic one?
I don't think it's an iron law that all diasporas are more conservative, but rather a general trend.
21
With Taiwan, I've read that Taiwanese Americans/Canadians are more likely to support the pro-independence party, even though that is not necessarily the more conservative, and clearly it's not true that all diasporic Taiwanese are pro-independence.
19
Yeah, and you might find different voting patterns for cosmopolitans in exile vs. economic migrants. With former Communist countries, those leaving were often the intellectual elites, but they tended to be knee-jerk anti-Socialism, which at least in the US lead to an embrace of Republicans.
And the Taiwanese diaspora is important because of dumplings.
31.2: fair enough, but I thought we were saying diasporas tended to be more conservative than average for their country of origin, not for the country where they end up? Even if Russian exiles in the 1950s US ended up as Republicans, they would still be more liberal than the average Russian in Russia.
30: It's sticky. In terms of purchasing power* most white emigrants are worse off; but the reasons for moving are predominantly self-interested, making it in my mind more akin to economic migration. The degree to which all this is mixed with racism varies hugely.
*Though not necessarily quality of life; eg. having to worry about getting robbed affects your quality of life, but isn't really quantifiable.
the demographics of who gets to leave (e.g. Iran, Cuba, the USSR).
I think the Buttercup rule would apply particularly to Cold War emigration, but less so in the last 30 years. Cuban emigrants to the US post-1990 are on the whole Democrats, pro-engagement, anti-embargo, and generally less ideological about their politics. And they're now the majority of Cuban-born South Floridians, though less likely to vote.
The degree to which all this is mixed with racism varies hugely.
That's the sig file on mailings from the RNC.
31.2: This could be simple change over time. A large majority of Taiwanese are now pro-independence, with support rising in younger cohorts. The KMT is probably in its death throes.
34
I believe it's that diasporic populations who have the ability to vote in their home elections tend to vote more conservative and/or nationalist than those who remain. It may not be the case they were more conservative when they left.
36
Yeah, that sounds likely. It could be something that looked like a general trend but was actually relatively specific to a particular period. I believe it might be the case with 19th century European immigrants too, but I'm not certain.
38: In my family, the split may be more between pro-indepence and pro-declaring independence. I don't think anyone is pro-unification. I came away hoping for independence without a war, though I guess I always felt that way, just without a direct sense of it.
40: I think that's true in Taiwan as a whole. IIRC support for actual reunification is in the single digits.
40
Yeah, how I've heard it framed is Taiwan Taiwanese don't want to be part of China, but they don't necessarily want to go around stating that openly. American-Taiwanese (at least some proportion) are more willing to risk military intervention from the Mainland to openly declare Taiwan an independent country.
From my experience in the Mainland, the vast majority of Chinese people (like, 95%) consider Taiwan to be a part of China, and would be pretty upset if Taiwan declared independence.*
*(AIHMHB, a funny story about this is when I was teaching English in China to adults, we had these textbooks clearly written for ESL teaching in America. On the nationality section, they were given the sentence "Bob is from X." and they were supposed to say, "He is Xese." Well, one of the examples was, "Phil is from Taiwan." My class chanted in unison. "He is Chinese." The book wanted them to say "He is Taiwanese," so I pointed that out as a possible other answer. Everyone started talking at once about how Taiwan was part of China, and one student muttered under her breath "Taiwanese terrorists" (taiwan de kongbufenzi))
Why not let them be part of Japan, as a compromise?
When the Qing ceded Taiwan in 1895, there actually was a Republic of Taiwan for some weeks, before the Japanese landed. They were playing for a French protectorate, but no dice. It would have been interesting if they'd succeeded. (They fought anyway on their own account, bloodily. There's ample history to build Taiwanese nationalism on.)
I think we need to ask ourselves if it's really nationalism if there's not any antisemitism involved.
47
I don't think there's much antisemitism, but there is this.
(Actually the KMT was allied with Hitler up until '37 or thereabouts, when the Germans decided to choose the Japanese for mostly pragmatic reasons, i.e., the Japanese were more likely capable of defeating Russia.)
48.1: I saw that when it happened. Fucking hilarious. AIHPMHB the engravings outside one of Chiang's houses are straight up totalitarian. More Stalinist than Nazi, but, shit. I need to go back there and get photos.
"The Taipei Times said that one of the school's teachers, Liu Hsi-cheng, had suggested Arabic culture as the theme for the parade but the students decided to go with Adolf Hitler after two rounds of voting."
See, democracy never goes wrong.
I think even the Germans took more rounds.
Wow! They really went all out (so A for effort).
TBH, I'm not sure that an "Arab" themed march would be that much less offensive.
MC, maybe you could suggest a Bros and Hos theme for the next parade?
Heh. (TBC, I didn't literally see it, I saw the Taipei Times article. More's the pity.)
I don't know if Green Island had totalitarian engravings or if the prison camp spoke for itself.
It was the combination of atavism and recentness that threw me. Like, I expect to see dinosaur bones in the museum, and I expect to see birds in the trees, but I don't expect to turn the corner and find a dead T-Rex sprawled all over the sidewalk.
The foundational basis of RoC 2: Taipei Drift is weird enough that general trends about diasporas and nationalism are likely to be hard to apply, no? The KMT are nationalists, but for being a different, hypothetical country. Vaguely like how Belarus is nationalist for being circa-1952 USSR.
Or like how the Tories are nationalist for, idk, Britain c.1852?
RoC 2: Taipei Drift
I would like to see the script, as long as it's respectful of Paul Walker's memory.
42: It really weirded me out when I first learned that many intelligent educated Chinese people living in the US totally 100% bought into the government line on Taiwan. We were counting how many countries we'd visited (as part of some icebreaker game) and two Chinese grad students got genuinely upset and wouldn't let us count Taiwan as a country (we eventually compromised on counting an unspecified one of East Germany and Taiwan). It still weirds me out. Is there an analogous thing that Americans (including ones with college degrees who travel internationally) all buy into that everyone else thinks of as weird government propaganda?
The second amendment, and America's sandwich obsession?
57 Tell that to Gianforte!
So Alyssa Milano is coming to town this week, hoping to charm college students into voting in the special election. Will they have heard of her?
Maybe John Emerson could get Scarlett Johannson to come campaign as well.
61 and 42:
I know someone pursuing a PhD in America who still doesn't know what happened at Tiananmen Square, and has no interest in finding out because her parents (who are cops) told her not to think about it. I find it particularly amusing because she's pursuing a PhD in *philosophy*.
Chinese nationalism is not just restricted to Taiwan when it comes to the "-ese" issue. A common experience ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia have is having to convince mainland Chinese that they are not "people of the Chinese nation" (zhongguoren), but instead are Malaysian, Filipino, etc.* In SE Asia there is a term that refers specifically to *ethnic* Chinese (huaren) that has no reference to the Chinese *nation* ("guo"=nation). However, many mainland Chinese are offended by this repudiation of the term "zhongguoren".
Do they ever say "Chinese where it counts, laydeez"?
68: Something quietly bubbling under in SEA is Singapore doing its best to rally opposition to China. I wonder if this is part of the reason.
"There'll be no frustrations, just friendly East Asians.
Under the SEA."
71 is good.
68: This is curious. I've come to understand "guo" to mean "polity", with the nature of the polity varying by context (minguo = republic, wangguo= kingdom, zhonghua minguo = Republic of China). Which has confused me, as it draws a distinction between "zhongguo" (the Chinese state) and "zhonghua" (China), which we don't really do in English. Per what you're saying, "zhonghua" maybe compares to something like "Europe" or "the West", "zhongguo" to "the European Union" or "Holy Roman Empire".
68: I think that's a fairly minor reason, since the more recent heating up of the South China Sea disputes follows from historically deep disputes about the sea, which is behind PRC attitudes towards SE Asian Chinese. (Singapore has taken the lead on opposition only fairly recently. Plus Singapore has always done much worse things, like train its military in Taiwan, whereas the PRC attitude encompasses all diaspora.) There are PRC forums where people talk about how the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia will be grateful for a PRC takeover---that the PRC can 'save' these people from their oppressors. This misconstrues ethnic SE Asian Chinese attitudes towards the PRC. Of course, I may be biased as I've been brought up to see the PRC as aggressors in this region.
last comment should refer to 70, not 68.
I also wonder sometimes if mainland Chinese have trouble accepting multiethnic states as legitimate, at least more so than a Singaporean or Malaysian would. I suspect that they'd feel the same way about Chinese Americans.
White people in central Pennsylvania apparently have trouble with both accepting multiethnic states and Chinese Americans.
75
IME in the Mainland there is a strong sense that if your ancestral home is in China, you are Chinese. It's functionally similar to certain forms of European blood-based nationalism, but since it's based on a different conception of descent/belonging it falls out differently in terms of its repercussions. (Also, "sons and daughters of the dragon").
There is a very large language component, however, such that a non-Chinese speaking Chinese-American isn't *really* Chinese in a way that counts, and in general Chinese-Americans are called "bananas" colloquially.* There are also not fears of racial miscegenation or "pollution" in a way that you have in parts of Europe and Japan. There is a strong sense that China can and should incorporate anyone willing to "be" Chinese (i.e. speak Chinese languages, eat Chinese food, and abide by Chinese customs). There is also an embrace of difference/heterogeneity as part of Chinese culture itself--e.g. Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Folk Religion can all exist and comingle freely, and they are all equally Chinese. There is also a massive celebration of China as a multiethnic state that incorporates 56 ethnicities, and Chinese people are very interested in learning about/traveling to ethnic minority areas. The national New Year's program features folk dances from each ethnicity, and it's widely watched.**
This analogy is oversimplified and flawed in a gazillion ways, but China is sort of France and Japan is sort of Germany. China sees itself at the helm of a civilizing mission that is universal in its embrace, rather than guardians of an ethnically exclusive heritage.
*My good friend was born in China and immigrated to the US at age 5. She's fluent in Chinese but is pretty American in her mannerisms/dress/interests. She did fieldwork in China, and got called a banana all the time. She came to visit me, and after she left, everyone would ask me how the banana was doing.
**Chinese internal colonialism is problematic in many ways, but it is not eliminationist in the same way that Western colonialism sometimes could be.
75
I've found Chinese people are confused by America, but then most Europeans are too.
Also, it's kind of hilarious how oblivious mainland Chinese are to how much they are hated by SE Asia. Now that China is actively promoting SE Asia as an affordable tourist destination for the masses, my guess is this is only going to get more pronounced. HKers HATE Mainlanders now that they're overrun with Mainland tourists and wealthy migrants.
Don't people get mad at being called "bananas"?
66: That really should be disqualifying from getting a PhD. If you care about learning and the truth that little, then what's the point?
77.2: Are those non-Han ethnicities and their languages considered "Chinese"? And how much of this comes from PRC policy, versus RoC or imperial?
73: Thanks.
the more recent heating up of the South China Sea disputes follows from historically deep disputes about the sea, which is behind PRC attitudes towards SE Asian Chinese
Could you elaborate? I'm now reading about the Hanseatic League, informal empire developing from the German mercantile diaspora in the Baltic. The contrast is interesting, since AFAIK imperial China almost always oscillated between ignoring its merchants and actively repressing them, though the Chinese SEA diaspora was at least as big as the Baltic German.
I was surprised to learn that Hakka people are considered Han. I blame American racial ideology.
I initially confused them with Taiwanese Aboriginals, for which I blame ineptitude.
What about confusing the Prussians with the Prussians?
I disagree that being called a banana means you're not really Chinese. The connotation to me is that you're betraying your roots and *ought* to be Chinese. Indeed, this is the kind of context in which the banana will be criticized for denying that they are "zhongguoren". Chinese Americans are viewed as somehow inauthentic if they're too Americanized.
"ought to be more Chinese" s/b "ought to behave in a more Chinese manner"
Ugh, just realized my response to Buttercup was not very coherent. Being a banana means not being properly Chinese in some way, but if your ancestors are from China, you have an ethical obligation to behave in a Chinese manner (just as she points out with the 'sons and daughters of the dragon' thing), which a person of European ancestry who assimilates into Chinese society doesn't have. So, there's a charge of inauthenticity and expectation of loyalty that's attached to "insufficiently Chinese" diaspora, that doesn't exist for a lot of other diasporas (certainly not for European immigrants to America). I don't know how it works for South Asians, for example.
83: part of it is due to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-Dash_Line
And the other part of it is that before the end of WWII & the independence of many SE Asian nations, it was long expected that the ethnic Chinese in SE Asia were only working there temporarily (like Turkish Gastarbeiter) and would return once conditions in China were better. This was more plausible when SE Asia was still colonized, since they didn't have citizenship of their colonial masters' countries, but independence meant that most of them stayed on as citizens of their adopted newly independent countries & no longer had China as the main power they were loyal to. Subsequent pogroms against ethnic Chinese in the region have reinforced this notion that they really belong in China.
This gives a much better account than Wikipedia. Apparently Chinese state media claims a 1000-year-long jurisdiction over the South China Sea.
https://qz.com/705223/where-exactly-did-chinas-nine-dash-line-in-the-south-china-sea-come-from/
I don't really have anything to contribute, but this conversation is fascinating.
Apparently Chinese state media claims a 1000-year-long jurisdiction over the South China Sea.
"The Longer East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere"
90.2: a lot of them would presumably have maintained links with family members both elsewhere in the region and back in China, because that's how trading families work - a lot of others no doubt sent money home?
This was more plausible when SE Asia was still colonized, since they didn't have citizenship of their colonial masters' countries
Not so: anyone born or naturalised in a British colony (before 1949) had the status of "British subject", just like anyone born or naturalised in Britain. If a Chinese-speaking ethnically Chinese bloke from Singapore came to London, he was, legally, no less British than the white English-speaking native-born Londoners he met as he disembarked, and had just as much right of residence and voting (subject to law) in London, or for that matter in Singapore.
The French Empire by contrast maintained a very clear distinction between indigenes and French citizens. I am not sure how far the Japanese got with their project of assimilating Koreans; I know they imposed Japanese names on a lot of them, but I don't know if they had voting rights, even if they lived in Japan.
94.4: Tessa Morris-Suzuki is good on this:
The legal framework of Japanese nationality was first set in place at a time when the creation of the Japanese colonial empire was just beginning, and this framework was further refined and developed as the empire grew. The boundaries of nationality, subjecthood and citizenship were therefore dynamic and contested. They were also riven with paradoxes, many of which arose from a central contradiction: the need for the Empire to unite its diverse subjects into a single loyal body while simultaneously seeking to divide rulers and ruled into a hierarchy of groups with separate sets of rights. As the Japanese empire expanded during the Asia Pacific War, colonial subjects in Korea and Taiwan were encouraged to see themselves as part of the inner circles of a multiethnic Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere [Dai ToA Kyoeiken], in which increasingly complex layers of rights and duties distinguished peoples of the metropolitan core, the formal colonies, quasi-colonies like Manchukuo and occupied areas. Identity, subjecthood, legal nationality and voting rights did not necessarily go together, and seldom coalesced into a single national heart.
...
The Japanese model of colonialism is often likened to the assimilationist French model, which involved an extension of the metropolitan order to the colonies, and contrasted with the British model, which is seen as involving a higher degree of autonomy for local people. (See for example Tanaka 1984, 159) This distinction, however, seems too sharp. France, Britain and Japan all had highly complex imperial systems in which the strength of metropolitan control and the degree of assimilationism varied both between regions and over time, and Japan in fact borrowed and adapted eclectically from both French and British precedents.
So, there's a charge of inauthenticity and expectation of loyalty that's attached to "insufficiently Chinese" diaspora, that doesn't exist for a lot of other diasporas (certainly not for European immigrants to America).
Don't know about expectations of loyalty, but Irish people in Ireland (and the UK) complain about Irish American inauthenticity all the time.
I figure there are more of us than there are them.
97: but from the other direction, though. They're not saying "That Bob O'Riordan* isn't kidding anyone when he says he's American just because he was born there. He's really Irish and he needs to admit it." They're saying how annoying it is that the Irish diaspora keep on describing themselves as Irish, when they (the Irish Irish) don't agree. "Plastic Irish" is the exact opposite of "banana".
*All hypothetical people are either Alice or Bob. All hypothetical Irish people are called O'Riordan.
"sons and daughters of the dragon"
It figures that the Chinese would identify with the Targaryens.
My family never did get on board with the Irish-Irish names.
it was long expected that the ethnic Chinese in SE Asia were only working there temporarily
Interesting, I hadn't known of that aspect. But it can't be the whole story, since the Chinese diaspora is far older, eg. 50,000* Chinese were killed in a pogrom in the Philippines c.1600, and I assume there were merchant communities long before that.
*Allegedly.
All hypothetical Irish people are called O'Riordan.
And drunk, am I right? Heyooooooooooo!
92: Really? You're studying global trade c.1200, right? Turkey, France, and Southeast Asia were all up in that shit.
Anyway, I just sent Heebie a post specifically to invoke your expertise.
94.2: Not arguing, but only a small fraction of SEA was British, and Thailand not formally colonized at all.
94 last: Don't know about Korea, but in Taiwan policy drifted over time, as Ume says. Japan was nominally committed to full cultural assimilation from the beginning, but didn't do anything consistent or significant until after 1931. They did impose Japanese-medium schools as the only avenue for official advancement, tried to shut down traditional Confucian/civil service exam type schools, with some success, and to graft Shintoism onto local religion, with none.
They did slowly get results though, with increasing success (superficially, at least) after 1931. For instance, the first distinctly Taiwanese literature appeared in the 1930s, written mostly in Japanese, by graduates of Japanese-medium schools and universities. The intelligentsia all rose through that system, and worked mostly in Japanese, even in their own publications, even pre-1931.
Taiwanese who studied at Japanese universities were able to settle there and assimilate, and often did so; they could actually achieve higher status there than in Taiwan.
I don't remember how voting rights or legal citizenship worked at all.
Japanophilia is also quite a big element in anti-KMT and pro-independence feeling. The intelligentsia were slaughtered by Chiang, and his regime was far harsher than the Japanese*. The KMT refugees from the mainland also monopolized the upper reaches of society, which remains a big source of resentment.
*At the end of their period, that is. They killed ~1% of the population from 1895-1905.
On the diaspora again, a distinct Chinese identity was promoted by the Dutch in Indonesia, apparently being created pretty much from whole cloth. Don't know any details though.
102:
You're right about the older diaspora. It's complicated. But the bulk of Chinese immigrants arrived post-colonization to work in the ports and other industries created by colonial powers.
110: Ok. And this is interesting in itself, considering those colonies weren't short on local people. The British* companies in the region plugged into the pre-existing Chinese merchant class, such that they were staffed almost entirely by Chinese, right up to senior management. I wonder if they preferred to import labor rather than use locals.
*The term for the Chinese managers was 'comprador', which is Portuguese, so I'm guessing the rest were similar.
Under Japanese rule Koreans were officially Japanese citizens, but without the rights that might have gone along with that. E.g., Korea had a Governor-General with both legislative and executive power. No Korean legislature or any representation in Tokyo, although the Imperial Diet exercised a lot of oversight over the GG's activities. Not sure but suspect they could have voted if they lived in Japan, although that mattered less over time. (Those staying in Japan postwar got officially reclassified as non-citizens. For a long time naturalization required running a huge gauntlet proving absolute assimilation - that appears to have been relaxed, they don't have to take Japanese names anymore, but not sure how far it's gone.)
Ume's link in 95 is informative.
The Japanese electoral law was not based on the family registration system but rather bestowed the franchise on all "male imperial subjects" who lived in Japan proper and (until 1925) who paid more than a specified amount of tax. In 1920 the Ministry of the Interior issued an administrative ordinance making it clear that this included "male imperial subjects" from the colonies living in metropolitan Japan.
[...]
The colonial franchise, unlike that for Japanese, would be restricted to men who paid more than 15 yen in direct taxes, thus excluding a large proportion of tenant farmers and workers. In any event, the electoral reform, which was passed in May 1945, was too late to have any practical effect.
In any event, the electoral reform, which was passed in May 1945, was too late to have any practical effect
I was just thinking "that's desperately crazy" when I remembered Wilhelmine Germany did basically the same thing.
So, you can see what looks like downtown Las Vegas from the line for ground transportation. Can I just walk it?
Actual downtown Las Vegas, the city itself, from the airport? No, that's like four miles away. If you mean The Strip you could do it, but it's going to be at least a mile or two depending on where you are.
That's a three mile walk. But the weather's nice.
I'll wait for the shuttle, I guess.
Woman here is taking pictures of the advertisements on the monitor on the shuttle bus.
Since I didn't buy Swarovski crystal when I had the chance in the Minneapolis airport, it's good you can buy it at the hotel lobby.
The Cheesecake Factory has outside seating that's inside but not as inside as the inside seating.
I think maybe I'm supposed to be under the sea.
They advertise the world's largest watch shop, but I don't know how they know when a watch becomes so large it's a chock.