My trip

So a few eons ago, roughly in the dirt age, I said I wouldn't be putting personal stuff on this blog. I wanted to make it funny, not a my-life-cumentary. I'm going to break that rule today though. I think you'll still find it more amusing than informative. My rule of thumb is going to be this: If, by the time you have finished reading this, you have laughed at least thrice, I have succeeded. However, once you have read this, if you can tell me what color my toothbrush is, I'll know I crossed the line.

I have to give you a little background, so bear with me. My wife and I flew to Boston with her family, stayed for a couple nights, then started a cruise that went around the New England area and ended in Montreal. My wife's family then flew back home but my wife and I stayed a couple days in Montreal. Let me see if I can paint a more colorful picture for you:

In Boston we all stayed at a wonderful hotel right on the waterfront. We were on the 12th floor. Each room had roughly four dozen plug systems in the wall, so that you could simultaneously recharge phones, work on the laptop, listen to your iPod, and, for the more adventuresome traveller, bring your own washer and dryer from home and do your laundry. The flatscreen televisions in all the rooms got so many channels that I think they made it to the four and five digits. I started randomly pressing numbers to see what I might chance upon and I'm pretty sure I got shots from the Hubble on one channel and, on the next, a thermal imaging satellite display of the current position of enemy troops in Afghanistan. The cleaning staff were all highly-trained ninjas. They didn't knock. You never saw them. Things just appeared clean within fourteen seconds of being out-of-place or dirty.

Then we got on the cruise ship. Each room here had fruit bowls where you could select which fruit you wanted to appear in there daily. All the meals were provided on board, of course, except somehow my usual diet of three square meals a day was transformed into 5 or 6 meals a day. And the effect they had on my mid-section was definitely not the shape of a square. There was so much dessert that they had an on-board dentist you were required to visit every other day to take care of the new cavities that had cropped up due to the sugar overload. The beds and pillows were plush and envelopped you in their arms of luxury every time you lay down.

Finally, we arrived at Montreal. On our own now, my wife and I had opted for a slightly cheaper hotel. In the E-mail correspondence I had with the hotel staff (confirming our reservation, etc.), they asked me if we would like, and I quote, "a double-bad room or a queen bad room." One typo I can forgive, but this clearly shows the intention was to write "bad". I can even be a little forgiving of those who don't speak English perfectly! Shoot, Montreal is a pretty multi-lingual town, I understand that! But "bad" is one of the first words you learn in another language. Here's the actual order:

The alphabet
Numbers 1-10
"Hello."
"How are you?"
"Good/Bad/So-so."
"Where is the bathroom?"
"Please don't shoot, I'll give you my wallet."

Of course, it depends on which country you're going to. Sometimes they teach you that last phrase before anything else.

Anyway, we arrive at the hotel. It's in a very different part of town than what we're used to. I'll just leave it at that and let you use your imagination. So already I'm feeling a little queasy about this hotel. Then I see that upon opening the front door, I'm faced with about 3000 steps. It looks like I've just entered an indoor ziggurat. I kept expecting to meet a Shaolin monk at the top who was going to teach me the forgotten martial art of Kao Tung. No such luck. Just the reception desk...er...window thingee.

So we get to our room and I'm thinking the place can't be all that bad. Sure, it has a few quirks, but every place does, right? The wall paint is cracked (on the walls that were painted), the phone doesn't work, the alarm clock is displaying what I presume are either Russian letters or Stargate symbols, the closet is...ok there isn't a closet, the bed feels like it's just a thin, dirty sheet thrown over slate rock, and the towels in the bathroom look like they were used to clean the bathroom floor and then hung back on the rack. That last hypothesis really wouldn't surprise me if I found out it were true because the person we had passed on our way to our room was not actually another tenant but the cleaning man. And for a cleaning guy, it looked like he didn't mind doing other people's rooms but had a strict personal rule against rendering his own chamber a little less...scary. Let's just say that if I worked for the CDC, I would have roped off the area immediately and taken an iodine shower.

He had been lying down on his bed watching TV in a wifebeater and boxer shorts, one cigarette in his mouth, another in his hand. In that same hand was a bottle of liquor (there was another half-full bottle of the same stuff by the TV). His hair seemed to have migrated south off his head and was now setting up camp all over his torso. He had given a partially-toothless smile and nod at us as we passed.

Awesome.

Needless to say, we spent very little of our sojourn in the hotel. However, the room was booked and we were only there for a few days, so we opted to stay. One evening as we came home there was a poor soul sitting at the top of the staircase. The gender was indecipherable from the bottom of the steps (and from the top for that matter), although I was fairly certain it was a human. It looked like he(?) had been captured in a giant net, beaten over the head, and robbed of most of his clothes. As I approached the last thousand steps I was able to see him more clearly and distinguish that my first assumption had been incorrect. He had chosen to dye his hair blood-red and the giant net actually WAS the primary clothing he was sporting.

So our accommodations throughout the trip juxtaposed quite nicely together (Mrs. Gafford, my twelfth grade English teacher would be so proud of me for using the word "juxtaposed" correctly in that sentence). From the height of fancy living right down to the depths of funkytown. To be fair, the owners/managers of that last hotel were quite nice once we successfully communicated through makeshift sign language. Which was mostly necessary because I was out of breath after climbing to an entirely different elevation.

By the way, my toothbrush is blue.

Pictures:
Boston Hotel
Cruise Ship
Mugger
Ziggurat
Toothbrush