Sunday, September 11, 2011

On the Predictive Value of Hotel Room Art

Here’s a little tale that illustrates why the pictures in your hotel room are worth looking at:

Friend Rita flew in from Portland last week for a visit. Although we rarely get to see each other nowadays, and hardly ever exchange emails, every time we meet up it’s as though we are continuing a discussion suspended only moments before. We plunged right back into the easy conversational flow of long time friends, speaking in half sentences, cracking one-word, inside jokes. (If you ever meet Rita and want to hear her laugh, just say oh-pie.) Her flight had arrived too late to embark on the two hour drive home, so we put up at a downtown hotel for the night. Over two crisply perfect martinis in the hotel bar, we made plans to do a bit of sight-seeing the next day before picking up her rental car.
In the morning, while waiting for my prink-time in the bathroom, I studied the pictures on the hotel room walls; black and white art photographs of famous Toronto architecture taken from unusual angles. Having lived and worked in Toronto for over twenty years, I was able to recognize all the photographs but one, a perspective shot of receding white arches towering over a familiar-looking building, all enclosed in a glass cube. 

It reminded me of a train station, although in which city, or even which country, I couldn’t say. I puzzled over the familiar-looking building until Rita came out of the bathroom, then turned my full attention to the much more important task of taming the stick-ups caused by a recent encounter with an overly enthusiastic hairstylist.
Rita and I are both knitters, although in fairness she is less rabid about the hobby than I am, so we made our first stop of the day at Romni Wools on Queen Street West, possibly the most famous yarn store in Canada. This was a mistake. The knitters code of ethics demands that upon entering a yarn store, every fuzzy ball in the store must be squeezed to test the hand.  Romni Wools is a vast, mind-bending cornucopia of floor-to ceiling-bins filled with yarns from around the world. And that’s just the ground floor.

After blissful hours of intensive squeezing, we staggered out of Romni, clutching bags filled with must-have additions to our yarn stashes, and into a nearby coffee emporium, where we flopped down at a table to re-caffeinate and squeal excitedly over each other’s purchases. Sufficiently revived, we toddled a bit farther along the street to a French restaurant, where they had just received a delivery of aromatic Enokitake mushrooms, so naturally, we just had to have lunch there. Emerging from the restaurant, clutching bags filled with must-have additions to our yarn stashes against distended tummies, we realized we’d used up our entire sight-seeing day squeezing yarn and it was now time to pick up the car.
Unfortunately, Rita had left the address of the car rental place in her backpack, which was in the luggage room of the hotel. I knew the only two car rental places downtown were on Bay Street, so we headed in that direction. Rita thought the street number was 161. I thought that was the address of our hotel and asked her if the car could have been rented from Eaton Centre. She said it sounded familiar, so we tried there first. No luck. We decided to call the help number on Rita’s AVIS card. She punched her way through an epic phone menu, listened intently for  a couple of minutes, then pressed the repeat button and handed me the phone, which I promptly dropped. I managed to pick it up in time to hear “BCE Place, Bay and Front Streets, Unit 10”.
Finding Bay and Front Streets was easy; we just allowed ourselves to be swept along in the tide of office workers scurrying toward Union Station to catch the GO train home. BCE Place remained elusive. We found a skyscraper labeled Brookfield Place at 161 Bay Street, but no BCE Place. I began asking passersby. No one had ever heard of BCE Place. Finally we found a security guard on the steps of Union Station who pointed toward Brookfield Place, so we went back and asked people coming out of the building if they knew where to find the AVIS rental office in BCE Place. They all shrugged denial. With no other clues to follow, we decided to at least look inside the building before trudging back to the hotel to get Rita’s backpack…
… and there they were; soaring white pillars arching over a 19th century bank building enclosed in a glass cube. Warm certainty settled over me like a lace-weight merino shawl. Despite the wrong name, this had to be the right place. A friendly newsstand vendor confirmed it, adding that the building had been renamed from BCE Place to Brookfield Place ten years previously.
So this is why you should always pay attention to the pictures in your hotel room, because you never know when you’ll need a sign.

2 comments:

  1. After blissful hours of intensive squeezing...this statement could be taken out of context in so many ways.

    Train station reminds me of Toronto...it seemed that big and awesome when I was but a meek girl from Portland.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brilliant! Enjoyed reading this blog. Can totally see ou spend hours and hours and hours in the yarn store. ...& will certainly pay more attention to hotel room art. E

    ReplyDelete