lose track of one’s luggage, but once the room is found there will be luggage in it, probably not one’s own, but no matter. People dressing up in one another’s clothes is part of the hotel policy to get everyone playing together. Mail and messages are not delivered but are hidden about the hotel like Easter eggs, finders keepers, and indeed Easter bunnies (live and otherwise) are a cheerful decorative motif throughout. The restaurant menus are playing cards, and one must find a guest with a matching card before one can be served—as a pair, of course. The menus themselves list no dishes, only conundrums, such as What is the color of surprise? or Where exactly is the universe? or If time runs, where does it run to? or What does an egg mean? and the guests are served according to their answers, usually to their complete satisfaction. There are costume parties every night, if one can find them, with dancing contests and sack races and sing-alongs. The playful atmosphere has provoked new games, invented by the guests, like goosey gander, nipple tag, and musical beds, but these innovations are not encouraged by the management, and such guests often find themselves suddenly shooting the chutes once more and landing in the alley.
The colors in the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game are mostly primary, the ambient music that of a rollicking hurdy-gurdy, and the dispersed aromas range from those of ice cream parlors and fireworks to hot asphalt, pencil sharpeners, and the seaside, depending on where one finds oneself in the hotel, and when. Indeed, there is, though not easy to find, a seaside beach somewhere in the hotel where the hurdy-gurdy melodies fade away behind the sounds of sand and pebbles sucking sea water, waves slapping against wooden piers, and the cries of wheeling gulls. There are shellfish expeditions here, daily beach parties featuring sand castle building and blindman’s buff on the boardwalk, and fishing competitions from the piers, where one catches not fish but fortunes, and sometimes toy cars or plastic earrings. Transoceanic excursions can be arranged for guests on extended stays, with overnights in the Tropical Island Beach Hut, which can also be reached by taking the Ferris wheel to the sixth floor, if one can find it (it is not between the fifth and seventh).
At the top of the hotel in the middle of a set of Chinese boxes is the Game Room (this is not the casino, which is called The Schoolyard), where management and staff meet with the design team to plot out each day’s activities and the structural adjustments required. It is here that all the jokes and riddles are dreamed up and the fun invented. It is widely assumed (the hotel’s publicity department encourages this public assumption) that these Game Room meetings are the happiest games of all at the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game, yet witnesses who have stumbled onto the Game Room looking in vain for their own rooms have reported dim lights, a heavy air faintly redolent of old shoes and books, and a prevailing mood of inwardness and preoccupation, melancholy, wistfulness, in which, say, the blowing of a soap bubble would be a cause for tears.
THE GRAND HOTEL NYMPHLIGHT
Although childhood is the source and model of all architecture, grand hotels included, the Grand Hotel Nymphlight is the only one known to be specifically devoted to “the child within,” as the hotel brochure puts it. Uniquely situated—it is in reality a hotel within a hotel—the Grand Hotel Nymphlight features all-glass construction, playhouse dimensions, dreamlike decor, common dormitories and restrooms, and, through innovative engineering, the literal re-experience of one’s own lost childhood. The universal desire to be a child again, full of innocent wonder and spontaneity and extravagant joy (as advertised), while yet knowing what one knows as an adult, is realized at checkin time, when, by way of a warm bath administered by the hotel staff, the guests are returned for
The colors in the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game are mostly primary, the ambient music that of a rollicking hurdy-gurdy, and the dispersed aromas range from those of ice cream parlors and fireworks to hot asphalt, pencil sharpeners, and the seaside, depending on where one finds oneself in the hotel, and when. Indeed, there is, though not easy to find, a seaside beach somewhere in the hotel where the hurdy-gurdy melodies fade away behind the sounds of sand and pebbles sucking sea water, waves slapping against wooden piers, and the cries of wheeling gulls. There are shellfish expeditions here, daily beach parties featuring sand castle building and blindman’s buff on the boardwalk, and fishing competitions from the piers, where one catches not fish but fortunes, and sometimes toy cars or plastic earrings. Transoceanic excursions can be arranged for guests on extended stays, with overnights in the Tropical Island Beach Hut, which can also be reached by taking the Ferris wheel to the sixth floor, if one can find it (it is not between the fifth and seventh).
At the top of the hotel in the middle of a set of Chinese boxes is the Game Room (this is not the casino, which is called The Schoolyard), where management and staff meet with the design team to plot out each day’s activities and the structural adjustments required. It is here that all the jokes and riddles are dreamed up and the fun invented. It is widely assumed (the hotel’s publicity department encourages this public assumption) that these Game Room meetings are the happiest games of all at the Grand Hotel Forgotten Game, yet witnesses who have stumbled onto the Game Room looking in vain for their own rooms have reported dim lights, a heavy air faintly redolent of old shoes and books, and a prevailing mood of inwardness and preoccupation, melancholy, wistfulness, in which, say, the blowing of a soap bubble would be a cause for tears.
THE GRAND HOTEL NYMPHLIGHT
Although childhood is the source and model of all architecture, grand hotels included, the Grand Hotel Nymphlight is the only one known to be specifically devoted to “the child within,” as the hotel brochure puts it. Uniquely situated—it is in reality a hotel within a hotel—the Grand Hotel Nymphlight features all-glass construction, playhouse dimensions, dreamlike decor, common dormitories and restrooms, and, through innovative engineering, the literal re-experience of one’s own lost childhood. The universal desire to be a child again, full of innocent wonder and spontaneity and extravagant joy (as advertised), while yet knowing what one knows as an adult, is realized at checkin time, when, by way of a warm bath administered by the hotel staff, the guests are returned for
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