hotels

Happy Election Day. I miss going to the polls to vote, absentee voting is boring, especially since they don't count them unless the vote is close (no matter what they say)
Anyway...I must talk about the hotel I stayed at in Mumbai because it was quite the experience. I’m not a swanky girl, I pretty much only require a bed and that the room be clean. The issue with India is that sometimes hotels that are mid-range can be rather unclean so it is always best to err on the side of swank just to be safe. That, coupled with the fact that I decided on Wednesday to spend the weekend away and booked my hotel on Thursday without putting much effort into it, put me at the Hyatt. Depending on which website you look at it is either 4 or 5 stars…and before you get all “hey, we are going through a recession and Alison is staying at 5 star hotels, what is up with that?”, just know that I got a crazy good deal on it through my travel agent discount (note: I’m not a travel agent, but I get the discount, it is all very complicated). Anyway, the hotel was really really nice, but it was the “only in India” things that I really noticed. Admittedly I’ve never stayed at hotel that nice anywhere else but:
When I checked in they walked me to my room to make sure it was to my liking (it was).
Every single person that walked by me in the hotel said “good afternoon maam, good morning maam, have a good day maam”, etc. I kind of got sick of it after a while actually. I get called maam about 20 times a day normally here, while there it was at about 100.
There was a bible in the hotel room (generously placed by the Gideons…I wonder if some Gideon somewhere has the job of tracking every new hotel that opens…and I wonder if there are bibles in hotels in communist countries…but I digress), there was also a copy of the Bhagavad Gita (if you don’t know what that is it is one of the holy documents in Hinduism…I actually read a part of it once). So you could choose your path to salvation.
Restaurants: the swanky hotels here are generally populated by foreigners and lots of business travelers. They usually each have several restaurants in them which is where you can go if you just want to be western for a bit. Confession: I had Italian twice. I had Indian for lunch but I really really miss good cheeses and felt like splurging on some good Italian food. I also had chicken cordon bleu for dinner one night. Not as good as my dad makes it, but very good nonetheless.
All in all, a very nice experience, and a fantastic hotel pool; seriously, best hotel pool I’ve seen yet. I don’t think I’m really a swank hotel kind of girl, but it is nice to indulge every once in a while and pretend like I am.