dagibbs | Hotels can be odd...

So, I'm in California this week, stay at the _Cupertino Inn_ in, duh, Cupertino. It is an odd hotel in a few ways.

From the highway, it looks like your standard block-like hotel building with windows. I register, get my room key, go up the elevator to my room, spot the direction for my room, notice the door that way is one solid piece of glass, walk through it and find myself suddenly outside. Yes, it surprised me, this hotel is built around an iterior open-air courtyard. Quite pretty actually, with a pool, hot-tub and fountain. Of course, even in California, it is kinda chilly for an outdoor pool right now.

Now, the fountain is ok, but it provides some cognitive dissonance with the little sign above the faucet in the washroom that says, "Please Conserve Water Drought Condition".

I glance at the tub when I arrive and notice it is a bit small, and I notice that the fan that must turn on with the light (argh, I hate that) is really noisy.

Next morning, I go to take a shower... and I notice that I can touch the shower head with my chin. With my feet flat on the bottom of the tub. Now, I'm not short but neither am I overly tall -- this is definitely a very low shower head. And, the door to the bathroom is about 1.5 times as wide as the door to the room. I ask the front desk about this -- and we go to look at another room, and it, too, has the really low shower head, and the really wide door to the bathroom. (It also has a door to an adjoining room, that is just as wide as the bathroom door -- and far wider than the entrance, which is normal door proportions.)

And all the lights are the really low brightness, energy conserving type. So I end up turning them all on, in the hopes of getting something like normal light levels -- defeating the whole purpose of the low-wattage bulbs.

Then, there's hotel art...

Anyone who's been to a hotel or two, will have encountered oddities in hotel art. Now, it isn't surprising that a hotel will buy in bulk -- several to many copies of the same print, so that you find the same print in several rooms. But, I stayed at a hotel in Calgary earlier this year (shared a room with my sister J, after my sister C's wedding), two beds, a painting above each bed, normal so far... except they were the same painting. Yup, two identical prints, side by side, in the same room.

Or, there was the room back in Lansing at one of the early Conclaves up there -- I was in an overflow hotel -- where the beige wall was decorated by a large (maybe 4' by 6') frame with a beige (different beige) border inside this frame (about 6" wide) surrounding a small edging, around a rectangle of beige (yes, a third different beige).

Well, at least I have high-speed internet here, wireless even.

P.S. Life still sucks.