All eyes today (Sunday) are focused on a little boxing ring inside the humongous MGM Hotel in the pleasure strip of Las Vegas in the arid state of Nevada in the United States of America. That’s where the boxer Manny Pacquiao, the greatest Filipino warrior of all time, and incidentally a member of Congress, fights his latest Mexican opponent. What he recently said in jest packs a lot of truth – that given the number of his fellow congressmen who have traveled to watch his fight, a legislative session could well be convened in one of the gigantic casino hotels after the fight.

In a time of economic decline, Pacquiao’s fights are a boon to Las Vegas. The people who have come to watch him are also expected to pour their money into the city’s countless gambling tables and slot machines. They will be dining, watching a broad array of other shows, and, most of all, they will be shopping. What Las Vegas will pay the two boxers, who will spend maybe an hour punching each other on the face until their eyes puff and blood oozes out, is insanely huge. But, it is a pittance compared to the money that this event is expected to draw into the city’s casino hotels from all over the world.

) That adjoin the lobby. Arrive at midday, and your olfactory glands might be overwhelmed by the cleaning staff’s liberal swabbings of ammonia.

The iron-framed beds are small, the mattresses a little lumpy. But checking into Hotel Congress with sleep on your mind is folly anyway. Long past midnight bottles clank, kick drums thump, locomotives rattle ancient windows.

The bathrooms? Tiny. A man of average stature can rest his forehead on the wall while he sits on the toilet (which I suppose is helpful if you’ve spent too much time at one or more of the bars downstairs). The showers are about the size of refrigerator boxes, and the temperature of the water trickling out of them is as fickle as Joe Lieberman .

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