The Venetian

The Venetian is the largest AAA Five-Diamond rated Resort in the US with 4,049 suites & is owned & operated by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. This is a Venice themed resort built on the site of the old Sands Hotel, & when combined with the Sands Expo Convention Center & The Palazzo hotel & Casino Resort it forms part of the largest hotel and resort complex in the world (with over 8,100 hotel rooms). Since the Venetian is a replica of Venice, there are plenty of canals outside where you can take a short boat ride in a gondola. The resort also has a shopping mall on the second floor of the building called the 'Grand Canal Shoppes' which is also a replica of Venice with canals gondola rides inside. While at the Venetian we saw three 'statues'. Two were 'real life' statues that seemed to be collecting a lot of money just standing still. We figured that with the amount of $$$ left next to the statues that we would get a good reaction, but after placing some money in front of one of the statues,all Beth got was a 'thumbs-up' - pah, what a rip-off! The other 'statue' was really a wax figure since The Venetian hosts the Las Vegas Madame Tussauds wax museum. The very, very, realistic figure was of Nicholas Cage & one of the funniest things that we saw was when one of the group of women (from a Bachelorette party?) had her photo taken whilst grabbing Nick's privates & announcing this at the top of her voice to the World (& probably most of the Solar System)!