Good Hotel

Online, the pictures looked amazing. Here we were right on Wall Street in Manhattan and we'd have THIS spacious a hotel room? Unheard of in my experience with New York accommodations!  I could hardly contain myself the day we drove here for the wedding of one very dear to us, who we have known since he was 15. And now here he was in his high 30s getting married to possibly the most beautiful woman in all five boroughs. And the event wasn't until Sunday night and here we were all checked in by 3pm on Friday and all this hotel fun ahead of us!It's true that the lone terrycloth robe we found was still damp - from the drier we fervently hoped - but Housekeeping brought two fresh ones up right away. Oh and the TV didn't work right away but somebody arrived to fix that almost before we had hung up the phone requesting help with it. So the service was great. Plus - this was even better! -  the room had this 12-foot long window seat you could sit on and look right into 100 different apartment windows directly across the street . In one window, a woman's naked legs on an ottoman! In another, a man starting to make his bed and then thinking the hell with it and flopping down on it instead. It was better than movies!"Do you think those people can look in and see US ?" I asked my man. "I'm sure the hotel coats the windows with something so they can't.""Doubtful," said Dave.But if they couldn't see us in our birthday suits, we sure could see each other, since - wait for it - the bathroom had no walls, or rather the walls were just glass, whose doors that swung freely, like saloon doors in an old western. No privacy for the toilet part, no privacy for the bath part. In fact, when you sat in the tub, anyone in the room could watch your every move through this big sort of picture window which you see here  on the left. I know I felt like a large pale reptile in a terrarium. And it was the same way with the shower.It almost began to feel like a spooky place with all these odd quirks,  this on-display feature and then with the way the plaques holding room numbers in the corridors repeated in illuminated fashion just below themselves.And yet here was a minibar whose drinks were all free, except the ones containing alcohol! - and who needed alcohol with a cozy bar downstairs and the wedding of the century looming before us? Plus the bride and groom had put a very nice red wine in all the wedding guests' rooms.I loved the place I decided. I loved our room, with the super-long windowseat that I lay stretched out on by the hour, watching the action outside.  I loved the five extra feet behind the long 'island' that held the desk and drawers and the TV .This I loved not just because you could stash all your luggage in behind it  but because when you walked back there you found  not one but TWO nicely upholstered banquettes and a  reflective surface on the back of the television so you could sit and do your makeup or fool with your hair. (That's me to the left, the morning after the wedding, when I was in need of attention to BOTH hair and makeup.)But most of all I loved to an odd revolving architectural 'element' that actually spun, so that - spin! -  here you had shelves and drawers - spin! - here a fat hook for those terrycloth robes - spin! - here a full-sized closet-  spin!  - and  here a full-length mirror. Some guests might want the mirror facing the sink and some might want it facing the bed (since you just don't know what people have in mind when they take a room haha) and you had all these options. And now, because a picture is worth a thousand words,, here's my narration of that odd slightly planetary rotation.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygVr3R7Zlkg[/embed]So think of the Andaz Hotel at 75 Wall Street in the town so nice they named it twice the next time you're in Manhattan! You do that and I'll wait and say more about this NY jaunt in another post. :-)