featuring the repeated use of glazed surfaces, giant potted vegetation and grey tiling.
The hotel boasted 605 rooms that faced one another across an internal atrium, but it soon became evident that the true soul of the enterprise lay not so much in hostelry as in the management of a continuous run of conferences and congresses, held in forty-five meeting rooms, each one named after a different part of the world, and well equipped with data points and LAN facilities. At the end of this August Sunday, Avis Europe was in the Dubai Room and Liftex, the association of the British lift industry, in the Tokyo Hall. But the largest gathering was in the Athens Theatre, where delegates were winding up a meeting about valve sizes chaired by the International Organization for Standardization (or ISO), a body committed to eradicating incompatibilities between varieties of industrial equipment. Solong as the Libyan government honoured its agreements, thanks to twenty years of work by the ISO, one would soon be able to travel across North Africa, from Agadir to El Gouna, without recourse to an adapter plug.
2 I had been assigned a room at the top western corner of the building, from which I could see the side of the terminal and a sequence of red and white lights that marked the end of the northern runway. Every minute, despite the best attempts of the glazing contractors, I heard the roar of an ascending jet, as hundreds of passengers, some perhaps holding their partners’ hands, others sanguinely scanning
The Economist
, submitted themselves to a calculated defiance of our species’ land-based origins. Behind each successful flight lay the coordinated efforts of hundreds of souls, from the manufacturers of airline amenity kits to the Honeywell engineers responsible for installing windshear-detection radars and collision-avoidance systems.
The hotel room appeared to have taken its design cues from the business-class cabin – though it was hard to say for sure which had inspired which, whether the room was skilfully endeavouring to look like a cabin, or the cabin a room – or whether they simply both shared in an unconscious spirit oftheir age, of the kind that had once ensured continuity between the lace trim on mid-eighteenth-century evening dresses and the iron detailing on the façades of Georgian town houses. The space held out the promise that its occupant might summon up a film on the adjustable screen, fall asleep to the drone of the air-conditioning unit and wake up on the final descent to Chek Lap Kok.
My employer had ordered me to remain within the larger perimeter of the airport for the duration of my seven-day stay and had accordingly provided me with a selection of vouchers from the terminal’s restaurants as well as authorisation to order two evening meals from the hotel.
There can be few literary works in any language as poetic as a room-service menu.
The autumn blast
Blows along the stones
On Mount Asama
Even these lines by Matsuo Bashō, who brought the haiku form to its mature perfection in the Edo era in Japan, seemed flatand unevocative next to the verse composed by the anonymous master at work somewhere within the Sofitel’s catering operation:
Delicate field greens with sun-dried cranberries,
Poached pears, Gorgonzola cheese
And candied walnuts in a Zinfandel vinaigrette
I reflected on the difficulty faced by the kitchen of correctly interpreting the likelihood of selling some of the remoter items of the menu: how many out of the guests in the lift industry, for example, might be tempted by the ‘Atlantic snapper, enhanced with lemon pepper seasoning atop a chunky mango relish’, or by the always mysterious and somewhat melancholy-sounding ‘Chef’s soup of the day’. But perhaps, in the end, there was no particular science to the calibration of alimentary supplies, for it is rare to spend an evening in a hotel and order anything other than a club sandwich, which even Bashō, at the peak of his
The hotel boasted 605 rooms that faced one another across an internal atrium, but it soon became evident that the true soul of the enterprise lay not so much in hostelry as in the management of a continuous run of conferences and congresses, held in forty-five meeting rooms, each one named after a different part of the world, and well equipped with data points and LAN facilities. At the end of this August Sunday, Avis Europe was in the Dubai Room and Liftex, the association of the British lift industry, in the Tokyo Hall. But the largest gathering was in the Athens Theatre, where delegates were winding up a meeting about valve sizes chaired by the International Organization for Standardization (or ISO), a body committed to eradicating incompatibilities between varieties of industrial equipment. Solong as the Libyan government honoured its agreements, thanks to twenty years of work by the ISO, one would soon be able to travel across North Africa, from Agadir to El Gouna, without recourse to an adapter plug.
2 I had been assigned a room at the top western corner of the building, from which I could see the side of the terminal and a sequence of red and white lights that marked the end of the northern runway. Every minute, despite the best attempts of the glazing contractors, I heard the roar of an ascending jet, as hundreds of passengers, some perhaps holding their partners’ hands, others sanguinely scanning
The Economist
, submitted themselves to a calculated defiance of our species’ land-based origins. Behind each successful flight lay the coordinated efforts of hundreds of souls, from the manufacturers of airline amenity kits to the Honeywell engineers responsible for installing windshear-detection radars and collision-avoidance systems.
The hotel room appeared to have taken its design cues from the business-class cabin – though it was hard to say for sure which had inspired which, whether the room was skilfully endeavouring to look like a cabin, or the cabin a room – or whether they simply both shared in an unconscious spirit oftheir age, of the kind that had once ensured continuity between the lace trim on mid-eighteenth-century evening dresses and the iron detailing on the façades of Georgian town houses. The space held out the promise that its occupant might summon up a film on the adjustable screen, fall asleep to the drone of the air-conditioning unit and wake up on the final descent to Chek Lap Kok.
My employer had ordered me to remain within the larger perimeter of the airport for the duration of my seven-day stay and had accordingly provided me with a selection of vouchers from the terminal’s restaurants as well as authorisation to order two evening meals from the hotel.
There can be few literary works in any language as poetic as a room-service menu.
The autumn blast
Blows along the stones
On Mount Asama
Even these lines by Matsuo Bashō, who brought the haiku form to its mature perfection in the Edo era in Japan, seemed flatand unevocative next to the verse composed by the anonymous master at work somewhere within the Sofitel’s catering operation:
Delicate field greens with sun-dried cranberries,
Poached pears, Gorgonzola cheese
And candied walnuts in a Zinfandel vinaigrette
I reflected on the difficulty faced by the kitchen of correctly interpreting the likelihood of selling some of the remoter items of the menu: how many out of the guests in the lift industry, for example, might be tempted by the ‘Atlantic snapper, enhanced with lemon pepper seasoning atop a chunky mango relish’, or by the always mysterious and somewhat melancholy-sounding ‘Chef’s soup of the day’. But perhaps, in the end, there was no particular science to the calibration of alimentary supplies, for it is rare to spend an evening in a hotel and order anything other than a club sandwich, which even Bashō, at the peak of his
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