Family Life

After weeks of planning, rescheduling and false starts, I’m finally in Gy?r. Yes, it’s impossible to get that double accent on an English keyboard. It won’t even transfer correctly from the Microsoft Character Map utility. The easiest is to copy and paste from Wikipedia. The gy is pronounced like the g in edge, and the o is pronounced like the u in put. You roll the r.

My hotel is very modern. Simple, straight lines. Minimalist. Nice. The bed and bedside tables in my room are low, there’s just a bottom sheet and comforter on the bed, no top sheet or even a proper bedspread. There are no drawers. They take energy conservation very seriously. There are no incandescent bulbs to be seen. Everything is lit by compact fluorescents or LEDs. The lights in the hallway are normally off–all of them. As soon as you step out motion sensors switch the lights on. In this hotel the lights in the entire hallway switch on immediately and all at once, so the effect is that they’re always on. It works well. In my Budapest hotel, the lights would come on in sections as you walked down the hallway, and each section would come on when you were in the middle of the section. The effect was of walking into a tunnel of pitch blackness, with lights following you instead of leading the way. Not so good.

The stairwell light here are also normally off, and I went to climb the stairs assuming the lights would come on automatically. They didn’t. It’s disconcerting going up the stairs in the dark, lugging a heavy suitcase. Later I discovered a switch at each level to turn the lights on (but not off–they do that by themselves).

And that’s another thing: stairs. They don’t realize here that elevators have been invented. Hey, if the building is only five floors high you don’t need an elevator, right? Use the stairs. What are you, lazy? No wonder Europeans aren’t fat. Oh yes, and I was reacquainted with the fact that the second floor means going up two floors, because the first floor is the one above the ground floor. No need to waste a perfectly good number on the ground floor if you always call it the ground floor anyway.

My room is at the end of a long corridor, with stairs at the far end. I thought I’d be clever and park at that end of the building and save myself some walking. See how I’m going to end up fat like an American instead of thin like a European? Anyway, I walked up all those stairs to the third floor (in disguise as the second floor) to find the door locked. With a key. That I didn’t have. I walked downstairs again, all the way around the building, in the main door, up the stairs, down the corridor and into my room. Sometimes I’m too clever for my own good. The worrying thing is that the fire evacuation plan glued to my room door clearly shows that locked door as my best escape route. The door is just as locked from the inside. I tried it.

Another surprise was that room service had cleaned my room during the day, but hadn’t touched a thing. I had made the bed in the morning, the basic way I would at home, and it was disconcerting to see it still like that when I returned in the evening. I had expected it to be re-made in the fancy hotel style you see in the photo. All of my stuff on the bedside table, the desk, and the bathroom was exactly where I’d left it. I looked carefully, and everything was definitely clean and sparkling. They’d done a good job but they’d left everything in place. The more I think about it the more I like it. Since I’m here for several days it feels like I’m coming home in the evening when everything is the same. So far my experience with hotels is that every morning the room is reset to its standard configuration, a daily reminder that I’m very much a temporary visitor. Now maybe that system works for messy people, but I like things in my own order and it has always felt intrusive when the cleaning staff rearrange the room. So good on the hotel for improving my stay by not tidying my room.

Yet another surprise was that they didn’t replace the towels. For years, hotels have had little notices in the bathroom saying, We care about the environment, hang up your towel if you want to reuse it and save energy, leave it on the floor if you want a fresh one. Every single time I hang up my towel, and every single time it gets replaced by a new one. What’s the point of having that sign? But here it’s different. They left the towel I’d hung up. Now I don’t mind using the same towel again. After all, I don’t use a new towel every day at home. And I don’t care about the environment so much that a new towel daily is going to bother me in any way. But the fact that the notice actually made a difference, that it wasn’t there just for show; that gave me a smile.

There’s a railway track outside my window, another cause for excitement (location, location, location!) but so far there haven’t been any trains. How disappointing.

I went out for a walk last night at about eight, but everything was shut. The pedestrian crossings were pretty cool though. No buttons, but somehow the crossings knew I was there. I discovered that if I timed my paces right the traffic light would go red and the cross signal would go green just as I stepped off the sidewalk onto the road, without even breaking stride. Admittedly this was Sunday night and there was hardly any traffic on the road. I imagine it would be different during the day, and pedestrians would have to wait. But it was a nifty effect, like the hotel hallway lights.

You may wonder why I’ve written a whole blog post about my first day of work, without actually mentioning work. That’s because I haven’t done any yet. I’m here to train the guys in the maintenance department, and they’re all busy tidying up loose ends from last week’s customer audit. No time for training. They gave me a desk, where I sat all day with my laptop and sorted photos and wrote up my travel adventures. So after all the pressure to get me to come to do urgent, urgent training, it’s not quite so urgent any more. That suited me fine. It was a fun, relaxing day. Maybe I’ll get to do real work tomorrow.

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