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Ritzy
The Ritz Carlton lives up to its name in many ways. For one thing, it's actually housed in a former museum, I found out today. I should have paid more attention when Deb and Nic (Mr. Deb) drove me up on Saturday, but my head was whirling and the bellhops were grabbing my bags like they were getting bounties on them, and I was inside checking in before I knew what happened.
We're at the top of Nob Hill, by the way. Some of the apartment buildings around here have valet parking, I noticed when I descended from the heights in search of a Walgreen's. We're right by two of the cable car lines, and in fact, we're sort of perched over the Stockton Tunnel. I can hear cable car bells from my room if it's quiet!
I'm not cut out for the high class life. The service here is just one shade above obsequious and it makes me nervous. The maids in the halls all greet you as you pass by, Housekeeping and Room Service greet you by your last name when you pick up the phone, maids aim to duck in quickly to turn down the bed for you if you leave the room for just a little while in the evening.
And there's issues that I never thought much about, like the rectangle of linen left on the floor next to my bed as part of the turndown. I'm guessing it's there so that my tender bare feet won't be sullied by the (expensive) carpet when I get out of bed, and this is way too fancy for me. (In my family, the closest we come to that is accidentally stepping on one of the family pets who's lain down there.)
Also, it's a very nice carpet. The bed is a very nice bed, and there's a feather mattress under the sheets, as well as a duvet above them. I think the room, including bathroom comes to about 2/3rds of the footprint of my house.
The bathroom features a whole lot of marble, which the more I experience it the less I like, because it's damn cold. I had to ask for guest slippers so that my toes don't fall off when I go in to use the toilet. I can't help thinking back to The Breakers where the marble floors in the bathroom were all heated -- now that was luxury.
The halls are not just fancy-schmancy -- I'm really astounded by some of the old oil-paintings they have hanging in the public areas, mostly pre-1900. The place is in really good repair, too.
Work-wise... it's been worse than I expected, because we've been having bizarre networking trouble in the work room. I've had to do the same intricate procedure on a couple of the laptops four and five or even more times because the network connection has crapped out on me before it completes, and sometimes I had to reboot. Surprisingly, we've still got all of the nearly 40 laptops updated by the end of work today (and we didn't stay much past 6, either), which leaves a bunch of database issues to address tomorrow. There's training sessions on Thursday and Friday, so it's not clear to me how much I'll be helping with them, and how much free time I'll have to call my own, yet. I may get sprung at a reasonable hour on Friday, or so I hope!
Today I decided, when the network had gone down for the Nth time, to give myself a vacation-ette, so I took off for a nearby Walgreens, way down the hill in Union Square. It just so happened that that's near a bunch of ritzy shops (including a Lush, where I got a Lavendar Blissard bath bomb) and window-shopped my way around -- then up another aspect of Nob Hill (which was, I swear, even steeper than the one I'd gone down) which took me just into the gaudy edge of Chinatown, with shops of glitz and gimcracks and silks and rhinestones and more stuff than I can possibly describe.
I haven't been sleeping well, despite the ritziness of the accomodations, and I've been waking up at EST hours. It's annoying that it's so much harder to adjust here than it was in England, which was a much more severe shift. Here's hoping that I can get some quality sleep in tonight....
We're at the top of Nob Hill, by the way. Some of the apartment buildings around here have valet parking, I noticed when I descended from the heights in search of a Walgreen's. We're right by two of the cable car lines, and in fact, we're sort of perched over the Stockton Tunnel. I can hear cable car bells from my room if it's quiet!
I'm not cut out for the high class life. The service here is just one shade above obsequious and it makes me nervous. The maids in the halls all greet you as you pass by, Housekeeping and Room Service greet you by your last name when you pick up the phone, maids aim to duck in quickly to turn down the bed for you if you leave the room for just a little while in the evening.
And there's issues that I never thought much about, like the rectangle of linen left on the floor next to my bed as part of the turndown. I'm guessing it's there so that my tender bare feet won't be sullied by the (expensive) carpet when I get out of bed, and this is way too fancy for me. (In my family, the closest we come to that is accidentally stepping on one of the family pets who's lain down there.)
Also, it's a very nice carpet. The bed is a very nice bed, and there's a feather mattress under the sheets, as well as a duvet above them. I think the room, including bathroom comes to about 2/3rds of the footprint of my house.
The bathroom features a whole lot of marble, which the more I experience it the less I like, because it's damn cold. I had to ask for guest slippers so that my toes don't fall off when I go in to use the toilet. I can't help thinking back to The Breakers where the marble floors in the bathroom were all heated -- now that was luxury.
The halls are not just fancy-schmancy -- I'm really astounded by some of the old oil-paintings they have hanging in the public areas, mostly pre-1900. The place is in really good repair, too.
Work-wise... it's been worse than I expected, because we've been having bizarre networking trouble in the work room. I've had to do the same intricate procedure on a couple of the laptops four and five or even more times because the network connection has crapped out on me before it completes, and sometimes I had to reboot. Surprisingly, we've still got all of the nearly 40 laptops updated by the end of work today (and we didn't stay much past 6, either), which leaves a bunch of database issues to address tomorrow. There's training sessions on Thursday and Friday, so it's not clear to me how much I'll be helping with them, and how much free time I'll have to call my own, yet. I may get sprung at a reasonable hour on Friday, or so I hope!
Today I decided, when the network had gone down for the Nth time, to give myself a vacation-ette, so I took off for a nearby Walgreens, way down the hill in Union Square. It just so happened that that's near a bunch of ritzy shops (including a Lush, where I got a Lavendar Blissard bath bomb) and window-shopped my way around -- then up another aspect of Nob Hill (which was, I swear, even steeper than the one I'd gone down) which took me just into the gaudy edge of Chinatown, with shops of glitz and gimcracks and silks and rhinestones and more stuff than I can possibly describe.
I haven't been sleeping well, despite the ritziness of the accomodations, and I've been waking up at EST hours. It's annoying that it's so much harder to adjust here than it was in England, which was a much more severe shift. Here's hoping that I can get some quality sleep in tonight....
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Ouch!
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I find that most high class hotels are just wasted on me. Comfortable beds are nice, but beyond that--well, fluffy bathrobes and mints on my pillow and all the rest just feels like surface trappings and wasted effort--somehow I'm not wired to feel pampered and luxurious by the presence of such things in the way I'm meant to.