Internet Withdrawal

[mundens]

This post may be a bit delayed as I don't have any internet access at present, so just so you'll know I'll say I'm writing this on Tuesday night.

This is being written in the Sheffield Ibis. The Sheffield Ibis is the worst Ibis I have ever been in. In fact it is the worst hotel I've ever stayed in that was in a major "western" city. It is worse than the majority of the hotels that I stayed in with seraphs_folly while in India. The décor looks like it would have been the latest in space-age design and colour schemes in the 1960s.

In the corner is an integrated curved plastic bathroom in a single moulded unit.

You can see the (shudder) turquoise and orange colour scheme on the outside, along with the flat door in a curved frame. It doesn't fit well.

The "curtains" are three slides of orange and brown and they've squeezed an additional bed in at the end.

The area the hotel is in is so bad that the entrance to hotel car-park is disguised and is surrounded by multi-storey walls on all sides, there were trails of blood on the pavement as we walked to work this morning, and urine everywhere.

The standard cost is £52 without breakfast, in other words about $150, and I wouldn't pay $70 a night for this room back in New Zealand, it doesn't even have a mini-bar or an iron (there is an "ironing room" on the first floor). It surprisingly has a wi-fi hot-spot, but it's not free, and the only way you can get access is to have a cell-phone so they can txt you your access code.

The hotel we were staying in before, the Mercure St. Paul's, cost £85 a night including breakfast and had free cable internet and wi-fi in the bar. The additional £33 was well worth it in my opinion.

Actually, I'm probably exaggerating how bad this is, other than perhaps the colour scheme, but the comparison to the place we were in is stark. The place we're staying in Manchester, The Brittannia, costs £160 a night, so it will be interesting to see what that's like in comparison!

But why are we in this hole? Well I'd like to say it's because of the room party, but in fact for some unknown reason, all the hotel rooms in Sheffield are full. In fact even this dive is full for the next two nights and we are being forced to stay in a hotel in Manchester and commute for two days before we get our apartment on Friday! Luckily, we have not been forced to find lodgings in a stable, as otherwise I'd be worried about virgin births.

The primary problem with being here though its the lack of internet access and thus the missing of seraphs_folly and any other contact. Work is as useless as ever and still haven't managed to arrange internet access for us at work. Hopefully The Brittannia has some internet for us tomorrow night, though currently without internet we have no idea where it is!

Last night I slept poorly because of a horribly hard bed, no air conditioning, continual machine noise and the background explosions of Guy Fawkes. I had a dream in which I was in and fighting various steam-punk mecha. At one point I was assaulted by a very small spidery one that had some how got inside my mech and was threatening my balls. While I was still spinning and dancing in combat with the other mechs I was having to try and maintain my relative position to the tiny spider mech, which seemed to be not very bright, as it was merely investigating what it had found and had not determined that it was part of it's enemy. I awoke and found I was uncovered, but hot and sweaty.

Right now I am watching Kevin Spacey in K-PAX. When that finished I saw some really odd TV Show where an odd German wearing a trilby was cutting up cadavers in front of a live audience, purportedly to demonstrate weaknesses of the human body and how to avoid dying from them. Yeah, right. It seemed rather voyeuristic to me and after confirming to myself that yes it was a real cadaver (or possibly a very good special effect), I switched it off. It reminded me far too much of the interview with the German cannibal on the night before.

They also had a very well muscled and proportioned naked man standing there on which to point out bodily locations. He was very well proportioned, except for his cock, which was under-sized (visions of Chi saying "Under-sized. Hideki is under-sized" dance thru my head). Must have been carefully chosen to not threaten all us average guys. :)

Comments

[panda-pitt.livejournal.com]

Basically the same layout to the rooms as my Hotel Ibis, though our colour schemes are a lot better and more consistent. We have air-con, but also no mini-bar or iron and I'm not sure about our internet situation. We roughly charge the same price, but I bet that Ibis is only a 2 Star hotel.

It's an international 2 star brand, but that's pretty freakin' expensive for 2 stars.

[seraphs-folly.livejournal.com]

Thats some disturbing tv - its like a marriage of homoerotic sex and violence by implication. O-O

[lobelet.livejournal.com]

I once stayed in the Ibis hotel in Wellington. The room was so small and cramped that the bed blocked the entrance to the bathroom and I had to lift the bed up and hold it to one side while I squeezed past...