The Lugano Experience

My good friend, Tiffany, decided to come visit me from San Francisco this last weekend, and, while she was here to see me, she decided she might as well go to some of the sites around like Venice, Florence and Rome.  So, since they were “in my neck of the woods,” I decided that I would bebop over to Venice for the weekend to hang out.  I say “them” because Tiffany was with her partner, Mary, whom I had not had the pleasure of meeting.  Mary is one of those rare people who I immediately felt comfortable with right out of the gate, and the weekend was a blast.

Now, before I continue into the real topic of the post, did you all notice that throw away “bebop to Venice for the weekend?”  Yea, that’s right.  Weekend in Venice.  Elvis sightings are at an all-time low - Sven sightings up!  I am just that friggin cool.

And let me reiterate that it was really great to hang with Tiffany and Mary.  My cheeks hurt on Sunday from laughing so much, and we saw many a cool thing in Venice…  (that, if you didn’t catch it, is a hint to all my other friends who have NOT come to see me).  But this really isn’t a forum for me to talk about what went great, so..

On with the topic.

Today’s topic is more an observation of Europe as a whole and not specifically levelled at my good friend Choco-Land.  You see, Europe is old.  And they have (really in their wisdom) decided to not wreck all these 4 billion year old buildings to put new shiny ones in their place.  You know, heritage and all that jazz.  The one real problem with that, especially for someone that is 6′ 3″ tall,  is that a long time ago, people were small.  Tiny.  Lilluputian.  There was no Guinness Book of Records Tallest Man, no NBA, no Big and Tall Shops.  Goliath (you know, of David fame) probably wouldn’t have made point guard for the Sacramento Kings - and yea, I know Goliath was not European, but you get my point.

Now somewhere along the line, we started growing.  I think it was about the time we developed rBGH and started pumping cows full of it then asking the general populace “Got Milk.”  I certainly know I had milk.  Lots of it.  We should have been asking “Got size 15 shoes?” because we are a lot taller these days.

So, put this all together, and you have really big people (especially us rGBH milk-fed Americans) in really tiny rooms.

Now, I decided, in my sometimes uncanny and deific wisdom, to save 40 Euro and stay at a “less expensive” hotel.  <sigh>  Less expensive does not always equate to ridiculously tiny or stupendously crappy,  but it certainly increases your odds of getting one or the other (or both) by several orders of magnitude.

And baby, I hit the tiny-room jackpot.

The check-in experience was pretty good.  The little Italian guy chatted me up, was friendly almost to a fault, and without too much fanfare walked me the 6 feet from his desk to my room.  Yea, no hall, no separate floor, door right from the reception area.  A little alarm bell somewhere in the recess of my mind chimed ever so slightly when I realized that all of the guest traffic in the hotel would be clomping in front of my door.

Alarm bell number two struck a chord when Signor Friendly opened the door to my room to reveal a cupboard that would have made Harry Potter cringe.  There was just enough room to step inside and close the door if you turned at the perfect angle while sucking in any extruding body parts.  The window opened, but only if you tilted the chair which smashed into the desk and turned on the light in some cataclysmic size induced chain of events.

The bed was a double (surprisingly) but so filled the room that it left next to zero walking area inside.  Shimmy-ing against the wall to get past the bed to get to the bathroom: 70 Euro per night.  Cracking my head on the wall-mounted 20-inch flat-screen during every shimmy to the bathroom:  Priceless.

And then there was the shower.  It was an upright see-through plexiglass coffin about 3 feet squared.  The only movement I could make while inside was an arms pinned-to-the-side, spin-in-a-circle knee bendy kind of thing while the spout pressed angrily into my forehead in some weird Venetian water torture.  Turn just right, and one needle-sharp burst of water would jet into my eye and flood my nasal passages.  This, by the way, was a certain way of jolting my otherwise sluggish body into full wake-up mode while having the special side effect of making me smash my head into the water spout causing the dozen water needles to gash into my bald head.

And all the while that I took this shower-of-torture, I could only hope that the water would somehow trickle down to all my parts for a good rinse.  <sigh>  Let’s just say I have had fresher days…

Ok, so in short (pun intended), the room was small.  Very, very small.  But hey, I was only there to sleep, and the price was right, and I was in Venice with good friends, so I was happy.  And after all, what else could possibly go wrong?

When, oh when, will I ever learn to NOT ask fate that particular question?

Saturday night fate decided to answer my question…  Stay tuned for Venice, Part Two or Sven Declares War.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 6:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.