Meagre breakfast in the marble cavern

November 3, 2009

Oh good - another hot, sunny day! Excellent. My wife had gone down to the swimming pool and I took a few photos of the beach scene from the balcony and focused in as best as possible on some fishermen on the beach who were looking naturally picturesque as they went about painting their wooden boat.



I went on as the advance scouting party, down to breakfast. To locate the dining room I walked through the maze of long, dark corridors of the deserted hotel, up, down round, left and right then everything in reverse and started again, repeated for floors which I am not even staying on, but all an essential part of the journey, due to some whimsy on the part of the architect. Maybe there was a world elevator shortage when they built this pastel-coloured cavern thirty years ago.

Eventually I came out into what was obviously not the breakfast room but perhaps a large guru admiration space. I base this judgment on the layout of tables and chairs in the middle of the room - a small table, and alongside it a single quality chair of leather, both set in the middle of the room with circles of lesser quality, harder chairs radiating outwards. Of course, there were no signs to quell my nosiness, and I began naturally to speculate on what the title of the event could have been. "Is transmogrification of the human soul ...." "Why does the human body decompose more rapidly when pummelled by a hammer than ...?"

The hotel is well cleaned and decorated, and I walked through now to the rather awkwardly empty breakfast room. I was in awe at the marble floors and staircases I had laboured along and down to get here. But why all the glamour when the end result, as I noted now with some dismay, is coffee pumped out of a self-service automatic dispenser, the croissants squeezed out of a cellophane bag and the orange juice from a carton? At the far end of the room a waiter arranged settings for lunch guests who would not come.



Why spend a fortune on tarting up a hotel to look like a palace in Dubai after the recession and not have a decent breakfast? "We'll spend hundreds of millions on the marble..." said the owners ..."and I'll go and buy the worst assembly-line croissants I can find, and some instant coffee and little sealed sachets of industrial jams..." said the assistant. I have a horrible suspicion it's mainly the British who stay here, because they'll put up with any nonsense as long as they don't embarrass themselves.

And my final note on this hotel that we will be leaving this morning: please put internet access in the rooms! This is 2009, for goodness sake. In sum: clean, soulless, vast, ever so slightly pretentious and pleasantly cheap. I'm off to buy milk somewhere in the local streets so that I can eat muesli in my room. Grump, grump, grump...




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