Tuesday Morning in the Hotel Room
It's 7:30am on Tuesday morning, and I'm back in the hotel room after breakfast. I had been thinking of going for a walk along the river, but it's below zero outside, and still dark. Perhaps not. Oh – I'm in Frankfurt, Germany, by the way – it just occurred to me that if you had not read recent posts, you would have no idea.
The restaurant in the hotel has changed since my last visit – lots of small changes – just enough to catch you out, and make you wonder if you're going a bit mad. The coffee machine has been replaced – the crema on top of a cappuccino is now much thicker than previously – if not careful you really could create a very impressive moustache indeed. At breakfast, small trays used to be provided – these have gone – leaving you balancing a plate, cutlery, and coffee en-route to a dining table. Oh yes – the plastic pots of yoghurt have gone, replaced by a huge bowl with a spoon. I imagine this is in response to the single use plastics mania – and has resulted in nobody eating yoghurt at all. Thankfully all the ingredients to make bacon and egg rolls are still in abundance.
Given the cold, dark mornings at this time of year, I might not get up quite so early throughout the rest of the week – except of course that means fighting for a table – arriving early, I generally get the pick of the entire place. This morning I sat opposite a group of construction workers, and a Japanese gentleman that insisted on eating with his mouth open. All I could hear while flicking through the news on my phone was him chewing up whatever was probably falling out of his mouth, and all over the table. Why do people do that?
I nearly forgot – I almost flooded the bathroom this morning! I tend to turn the shower head towards the wall when I turn it on in hotels, because you never can tell what's going to happen next – a torrent of ice water, or the contents of a boiling kettle. After letting the shower run for a few seconds, I began wondering why a puddle was advancing across the floor. A deep puddle. That's when I discovered that the shower glass doesn't meet the wall – so I was spraying the shower directly at the gap – and the water was escaping at quite a rate. And that's why I no longer have any dry towels – I hope the housekeeping staff won't be too mad.
During check-in to the hotel yesterday I was given a voucher for a free drink at the bar – I gather this has something to do with staying at the hotel so often in the recent past. If you spend the GDP of a small African nation on hotel rooms over the course of a year, you get a free drink. I was going to save the voucher until later in the week, but temptation got the better of me last night – so armed with my paper journal and a pen, I wandered down to the bar.
I have bought a beer from the hotel bar a couple of times before. It comes in an impressively tall, graceful glass that makes your beer look very impressive indeed. No tall graceful glasses for the free beers though, it would appear – instead, you receive perhaps the smallest glass ever seen by the human eye. You know the Father Ted joke about 'this beer is far away, this beer is very small' ? I could have re-created it with a beer on the next table, and my beer – which in a photo at the right angle would have looked the same size.
It's finally getting light outside. I'm wondering about getting some fresh air – wandering along the edge of the river that runs through Frankfurt, and admiring the lunacy of those out running, cycling, or rowing. Wish me luck.