Heat Of The Day

I forgot to mention something in my last blog, and I want to share it now. We moved to our fifth hotelroom! We had this great room up on the 24th floor. Lovely view I must say, but no pictures taken. Thursday evening, it started to get hot in our room. Temperatures inside started exceeding those outside, even with the air conditioning on. Bart found that the airconditioner was only sending warm air into the room, despite it being set to 72 Fahrenheit and Cool. We started at 80 somewhere that night, and went to 86 before we called engineering. Bart then went with Georgi and his new car, to get something to eat, while I waited for an engineer while watching Snakes On A Plane. Ika, one of the Russian engineers, and one of the greatest people around here, couldn't fix it in half an hour and decided to let it go. Apparently there was something wrong with the cooler, the vent and the entire machine, for that matter. I asked him if we could leave our belongings in this room, sleep somewhere else and get back when he had it fixed. I didn't want to give up the view.
It all ended with us going to the 16th floor instead. Had to wait for Bart to get back to tell him the good news and he started packing when I had already moved most of my things.

Today was a busy day at work, as the hotel is quite full yet again. Met some people I've seen over the last few days, in their rooms while asking if everything's alright and if I can help them still. Mostly, the answer is something along the "thanks, I'm fine" lines. Not today, on one occasion.
In the city center there's a convention about AIDS/HIV going on, and it hosts about 3000 people, of which quite a few are staying here. Funny thing at that, a few of the housemaids thought that all the people that were staying here, were infected, rather than attending for a lot of different reasons!
A woman from the pacific island of Guam asked me if I could open her door for her, as her card seemed faulty. I used her card and got it on first try, explaining the exact workings of that keycard. Asked her if I could do anything else, and she said she didn't want to waste my time. I was close to the end of my shift and had one room left to go, so told her it would be no bother.
She showed me her suitcase and asked for some tape to keep it together, as it let her down earlier that day. Had Ika bring the remote control to another room as I was about to do myself, and I fixed her suitcase. Then talked a bit about my English (which she consider rather amazing for a foreigner, while most people still get a hint of it and ask me if I'm German. Really. A lot of them do that, if it's not me, it's with Bart) and the internship I do. Finished the conversation with information about Guam, and travelling (apparently it took her 26 hours to get from Guam to Fort Lauderdale) before Bart paged me to gather and round off our work.

Currently I'm sitting here in one the hotel's bathrobes, with the hotel's slippers on, after I took a bath in the jacuzzi in the bathroom. I never realised that the water had such a weird colour. After all, when it just comes out and fills a glass, there's not much too it. Fill an entire bath tub, and you start to notice it's a bit yellow/green. Then, with the bubbles turned on, and a little bit of body wash in there, it's easy to create a miniature sky in your bath tub, filled with dense clouds. Makes for great pictures though!

So here's that very picture, of me in a whitened bath, and after that a 9 minute youtube video of Pat Metheny Group's "Heat Of The Day"