I thought I’d show you around my hotel room. It’s pretty comfortable, with AC, a fridge, microwave, electric kettle, TV with 102 channels in various languages (Hindi, Kannada, English, etc), internet. The internet connection (wired, not wireless) is limited to 200 kbps, which is problematic for streaming video, and it goes down every couple of hours. In fact, it behaves a lot like my old Linksys wired router did when it started to die.
To turn the suite’s power on, I have to insert my room key into a receptacle in the wall. That’s fine, but it means there’s no way to charge electronic gear while I’m out. I have to leave the key with the front desk when I leave the building, and ask for it again when I return.
The bathroom has a proper shower, along with the standard Indian bucket arrangement. The hot water tank for the shower, controlled by a switch on the wall outside the bathroom, where you’d least expect it, takes about 15-20 minutes to heat up. The tank’s good for about 5 minutes or so of hot water, and the pressure’s good. One of my less-favourite things about my last visit was my inability to get a decent shower; that hasn’t been a problem this time.
The switch for the air conditioning is also in a strange place, hidden amongst a group of light switches on the other side of the room that mostly aren’t hooked up to anything. After turning the AC switch on (assuming you can figure out which one it is), it takes a few minutes before the AC unit itself comes to life.
The bed is comfortable, very hard the way I like it, and there is a ceiling fan directly above it. The window looks out over a construction site, which usually isn’t a problem at night, except once when a cement truck made a suspicious-looking delivery at 1am, and last night, when a truck with a crane and boom poured the floor slabs for all of the floors that have been built so far. It was a night of diesel-powered pumps, yelling, pneumatic packers, and hammering. It didn’t bother me much, though, because I’ve been sleeping with earplugs anyway to block the muezzin who starts calling the morning prayers at 5:30 every morning. The traffic noise, non-stop honking and squealing of brakes, starts about 6am and ends around 11pm.
I send my laundry out once a week. It comes back a day or two later, nicely folded and mostly dry, so I know they have a proper dryer. At the guest house for my 2006 visit, the laundry was air-dried outside, a process that took several days in the humid air. Nothing ever really dried out, and I sure didn’t enjoy the smell of mildew in my collars. At the hotel, sometimes my clothes come back with twine tied to them for identification, but still this week I received an extra shirt, and last week one pair of my underwear took an extra day to find its way home.
The cupboard locks. The hotel recommends not leaving anything laying around, so everything gets locked up while I’m out.
There are insects. Welcome to the tropics. Although the hotel is fumigated once a month, I still kill a roach every couple of days (three the night I arrived). They’re relatively slow and easy to catch, and of the ones I’ve seen, I haven’t missed one yet. I’ll have to make sure I don’t inadvertently bring back any for my cats to chase.
The hotel has a restaurant attached, where I have breakfast every morning. I usually have the place to myself. I eat, read the paper, drink a pot of coffee. The restaurant is open until 11pm I think, but I still haven’t eaten dinner there. That’s partly because I’m still full from the enormous breakfasts and lunches, but also because hot weather erases my appetite. Room service is available all night though, and sometimes I get a call from room service after I get home, asking if they can bring me anything. After the house-boating trip, I hadn’t been around for several days, and when I got back the restaurant manager called to say, “I miss you, sir.” Apparently I have a reputation as the westerner that eats only Indian food. Here’s the goldfish that lives on a ledge outside the restaurant.
Home, sweet home!