We'll Leave the Light on For You

OK - so I have survived thus far: the holidays, the pack, the move, the drive and the flight. Now it really gets interesting (at least it seems that way in my head).

Jan 8th: To my delight and surprise, my luggage arrived OK. I should end the blog right here as that is friggin exciting news, yes?!

We get a taxi and arrive at the hotel - nothing of note here - except the cabbie's car smelt a little funny...like when you walked by that certain dorm room back in college? The dorm room where the students always seemed to have money but not for too long, laughed at everything and ate a lot of Funyuns...Yeah. You feel me on that one.

Anyway, I digress. The scenerey between the airport and the city reminded me of New Hampshire a bit. Kind of a hard / stony landscape - not really soft / hilly. Like it was just cut roughly. I've got no other way to explain it. There was some snow on the ground, but not too much. It was about 33/34 degrees. Not too bad. I couldn't read a damn thing from the signs posted - that was kind of weird.

Think about it. All of the stuff you see everyday, but don't really see because you have your routine down cold. Street signs, mail boxes, exit signs, gas station window advertisements, bumper stickers, billboards, bus stop movie promotional posters, even graffiti. Can you imagine trying to understand graffiti in a foreign language? Trippy.

When we get to the hotel, at this point, I've got no idea where we are in relation to anything, so this is severely tripping me out, AND, the hotel is undergoing construction. How marvelous! We check in and go to our room on the 5th floor (1 floor beneath the construction work by the way. How marvelous!)

This is what greeted us when we exited the elevator to find our room - this is where my room was supposed to be. Now...either this is the smallest room known to exist anywhere, OR, our room just did not exist and someone felt like having a bit of a laugh over the Americans.

Dude, I had vertigo. I felt insane for a few seconds. Believe me, that is not a fun feeling AT ALL!

Here is a few mad thoughts that entered my head at this time...

If I open that door, it will be like a Bugs Bunny cartoon and it will open to nothing but a gigantic hole facing the street - ya know the one I mean - where someone opens a door and hangs a leg out over nothing but air and then grabs the door jamb because it is such a shock...OR...If I go back to the lobby, it will be 1928 like in the Shining where there will be men in zoot-suits and tommy guns while the women will be dressed in long skinny gowns grasping cigarette holders. It was BIZARRE.

We finally did find the room, but only because it had to be there. We ended up in several deadends, and tried every corridor. There was only one door left (besides the creepy box you see in the picture). So, like Sherlock Holmes says "It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

We get in and it was really a nice room....or was it? DUHN DUHN DUHN...

To make sure I wasn't in the Twilight Zone or Outer Limits I took this picture from the peephole...just in case there was an army of the living dead staggering about outside the door yearning for fresh brains.

The bathroom had a surprise though. The world's tiniest trash can. I swear to God. It can hold MAX: 2 strips of dental floss, 4 wadded up tissues, 1 disposable razor, 3 chewing gum wrappers and 1/2 cotton ball. Now, here is the question. Ready?

Is it really a tiny trash can OR are the ones I have back in my bathrooms in the US really big? Think about that for a second or two. It'll bend your head, man.

Seriously, based on the time you spend in the bathroom, how much trash do you actually accumulate? Probably the items I mentioned earlier... So think about that. Why not have a trash can big enough just for the trash you make in your daily bathroom trips. Why keep anything bigger? I mean all you do with a larger trash can is continue to stuff and stuff it full of crap only to, maybe after a week, if you happen to find a plastic shopping bag laying about, you end up pouring all of the junk in the bag (and let those q-tips which fell out of the can stay where they are because they rolled out of sight where no one can see anyway) ONLY to put this overstuffed plastic bag of junk back into the trash can INSTEAD of actually throwing it away?

Or is that just me? I feel like I just asked for a high-five and got left hanging on that one... Well, I guess it helps that a cleaning crew pops in once a day to empty the ziploc baggies of trash out of here, but still, its a thought.

Guess what greeted me on the little (or is it really little) table? Swedish goodies. Too bad I can't read the ingredients, but I still might give them a whirl some night when I'm bored and am too lazy to go downstairs to smoke. I think those might be 'M n 'Ms, but I'm too chicken right now to try it...and I think the things in the blue bag are gummies....

Come back often around as days 2-7 are on the way. Feel free to comment / ask questions. I'll do my best to respond.