The Main Attraction hr589

On the first day of my latest trip, I checked in the hotel after I left the shopping mall. The room had a big window looking out on Tokyo Bay. A night view of the jet-black sea and glittering skyscrapers of stylish condominiums was spread on it. Onto the gorgeous glass table, I laid out packs of deli foods that had a sticker telling ‘Half Price’ on each lid that I’d gotten at the grocery store in the mall. My chief delight of a trip is to enjoy drinking in a hotel room. I usually get food outside the hotel and bring a small plastic bottle that I refill with cheap brandy beforehand at home. Compared to the room service, the cost is digits lower in this way although the place to have it is the same. It feels like I order room service of a space as an elegant cocktail lounge by staying at a hotel instead of drinks and foods. Since I bring cheap liquor and snacks, I can enjoy drinking in a quiet, luxurious setting without worries of the bill or the closing time, which is somehow my main purpose of a trip. I was nibbling on half-off seafood looking out the view that I couldn’t possibly see out of my apartment window and wished this moment would last forever. Although I had feared the hotel might be crammed with Chinese tourists because of the Lunar New Year, it wasn’t the case here and I didn’t see many of them. But as the way the world goes, hotels are never quiet enough to sleep in well. I woke up next morning by noises from neighboring rooms without sleeping tight. Quite a few hotels stand together in this area and I walked to the different hotel for lunch. A restaurant in that hotel has a lunch buffet that is reasonably priced and served in a chic atmosphere. About 95 percent of the customers are women and the place is always full. I had no trouble to get a table though, as I had made an online reservation that gave me a discount. I enjoyed as much roasted beef and dessert as I wanted that was too expensive to have in my daily life. Then I moved to a nearby outlet mall. Because my apartment is about to be burst with cheap clothes already, I just strolled around as a window shopper. But when I found a bracelet at $5 that was marked down from $30, I couldn’t help jumping at it. I was staying at the same hotel that night, which meant my favorite drinking time would come again. I got a plastic bottle of wine at $4 and, as I was still more than full from the lunch buffet, some salad and light snacks for dinner at a convenience store and walked back to the hotel. Before going back to my room, I had an important thing to do – using the hotel’s premium member lounge as a nonmember, again. I repeated the extravaganza of the previous day there, having expensive coffee and tea for free as much as I liked. I didn’t know why free drinks tasted especially good, but I knew for sure that I was the one who made the most of the free use of the lounge as this hotel’s off-season promotion. It was early evening and there was still time until I opened my cost efficient bar by myself in my room. So I went to the fitness club of this hotel for the first time. The club requires an outrageously expensive membership fee and normally I just do nothing but ignoring its existence. Only, this off-season promotion stay came with preferential treatment at no extra cost that included the free use of the club. I was curious what an astronomically expensive fitness club looked like. As I walked through a glass corridor leading up to the club, I saw the whole new world unfold before my eyes. I had cherished drinking in a hotel room as the main attraction of a trip for years till then. Yet the experience I was about to have in this fitness club overturned and changed everything so easily…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.540

My grandfather and I used to go to the department store together when I was a small child. He had a pass that entitled senior citizens to a free ride of the municipal streetcar. He usually said, “Not using the free pass is waste of money,” and tried to take the streetcar as much as he could although he had no place to go. As part of his useless effort, he often went to the department store where he didn’t have to go at all, and made me accompany him. While he didn’t have anything to buy, he strolled around all the floors. To get only one different floor he used the elevator that had an operating girl inside who would push the buttons and say the floor information, and the other girl outside who would close the outside iron door manually. It seemed he enjoyed the ride as a free attraction. His typical behavior was to ask a salesclerk the price whenever he spotted something expensive that he had no intention to buy, and to exclaim loudly, “How expensive!” He often looked into the costly merchandise that was on display in the glass case, asked the price, cried his ‘how expensive, and just walked on. When he was looking into the glass case of fountain pens intently one time, the salesclerk asked if he wanted her to take some pens out of the case and show them to him. He pointed out one by one and the clerk put them out on a sheet of velvet. He asked the price each time and at each answer he exclaimed, “How expensive!” “Outrageous!” “That much for a pen?”“Really, really expensive!” His loud remarks rang out through the quiet, elegant floor. After five or six pens were laid on the velvet, he just thanked the clerk casually and left the counter as if nothing happened. Even as a small child, I duly sensed his behavior was fundamentally embarrassing. That was why I hated to go out with him so much. In the lunchtime, he would order the most inexpensive noodle at the food-court-like restaurant on the top floor of the department store. He always ordered one dish for two of us and asked for an empty small bowl to divide the noodle into two. While I ate the smaller portion, he eagerly poured free tea, saying, ”Make your stomach full with free tea if that’s not enough!” We usually had a lot of free tea since we were hungry with only one noodle, and the huge kettle on our table went empty fast. The table was shared with eight people and each table had one kettle. He would start going around other tables for a full kettle. Many kettles were sometimes empty and he would go to the far end of the restaurant for free tea while checking the remaining content of every single kettle along the way. He would loudly say, “Those who pay for a drink are crazy when they have free tea!” right next to a customer who was drinking a glass of soda. In those cases, he would return to our table with a kettle in his hand as if he had hit a gold mine. Even a small child like me understood that his habit was extremely embarrassing and I really hated to go out with him. He did all of these things so happily by wearing tattered clothes and shoes with a hole, and he clearly enjoyed it immensely. I grew up and noticed there was a terrifying thing such as atavism. When I visit an outlet mall, I first go through price tags to see the percentage of discount, and if the percentage is big enough, start looking the merchandise itself. Last time, my partner asked me to quit that habit of mine. He wants me to look at the merchandise first, then the price tag. I don’t order a drink at the food court because it has a free water server. I also bring an empty plastic drink bottle from home and refill it with the free water for later breaks. “Those who pay for a drink are crazy when they have free water,” I usually murmur in my mind…