Saturday Morning – VERY early
We got in yesterday and got settled without any problems. The hotel (Novotel) is in the CBD (Central Business District) and is quite obviously geared toward business people who are trapped and have little choice.
The front desk staff weren’t especially helpful. The guy acted like we were imposing on him to check in, only gave us one key (HELLO! THERE ARE TWO GUYS HERE CHECKING IN FOR A WEEK!!) and didn’t offer any instructions about anything.
We got inside and nothing would come on – no air conditioning, no lights, etc. On top of that, the room was about the size of a shoebox, with a queen size bed. Us plus sized folks don’t care much for queen size beds, especially when we’re already tired. We figured out pretty quickly this wasn’t going to work for us, so EB went back downstairs to see what else could be done.
When he returned, we had a room on the 8th floor with a sitting area and kitchenette. It’ll be worth the difference in price to have a bit of space to spread out. To get anything to come on you have to put your card in the light switch, which apparently trips a circuit breaker or something – that part is actually pretty smart in my opinion. Had dad known about them, we undoubtedly would have had them installed growing up! The other thing – all the electrical outlets have a switch on them. Thus, you can cut everything off by just flipping the switch. If everything weren’t 220 I’d be tempted to figure out how to get some of those for our house.
After we got settled and showered, we met up with EB’s teammates and went for a walk and to dinner. We were all trying to stay up so we adjusted to the new time. You can tell how well that worked by the fact that he was writing at 2 in the morning and I’m here at 5. We can’t both be on the internet at the same time because, of course, it’s a wired system and there’s only one outlet in the room.
In retrospect, Indian food, even good Indian food like we had, was probably not the best choice on our digestive systems after 2 days of airplane / airport food. On the other hand, any vagrant germs floating around the airplane that we might have inhaled didn’t stand a chance by the end of the meal.
We made it to 9:00, floated through the 7 television channels available (5 dedicated to sports, and 2 being duplicates) before we crashed. The internet and the card in the room talk about 14 TV channels – the rest seem to be inoperative. We had the forethought to set both of our Blackberrys as alarms so we didn’t happen to oversleep, since we’re both excited about the Margaret River trip today.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to make sure that my blackberry was set for the appropriate time zone, and about 11:15 p.m. (local time), it decided that it was, in reality, 6:15 a.m. (probably Los Angeles time) and went off. Alarms at strange times are hard on middle aged men.
