April 28, 2010

It’s been a few days since I’ve left the Manhattan Hotel in Dubai after being stuck there for eleven days and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m starting to miss it. I miss the clean lobby manned by the hard as nail Sikh with the pot belly that can’t speak English but can lift an overweight suitcase with one hand while pushing out a drunken Asian man with the other. I miss the wifi that cost £3 an hour but it takes three tries to get on and each time takes ten minutes off the time you bought. I miss the short light skinned, suited Pakistani man that manned the desk till midnight that smiled and told you that he’ll send up some fresh towels all the while shaking his head back and forth which means you’ll never see those towels. I miss the darker skinned Indian guy who watched the front desk from midnight till 7 in the morning whose job it was to make sure no drunk leaving the three bars trashed the lobby or threw up too close to the front door. I miss the small bar off the lobby that had three flat screen TV’s all tuned to cricket and African football and was decorated to look like the inside of an all white, chubby plane that will never fly because of the round bar in the middle and the bad service from the Nepalese bartender. I’ll miss the bar snacks they served in the white plane bar that included extremely salty popcorn and a Bombay mix that freed up your bowels so much the next day that you truly felt like you were actually in Bombay the night before. I miss the night club on the ground floor with the original named Asian Night Club where Asian women and Asian looking women did bad line dancing and the men watching tipped them with prepaid plastic disc all the while wondering what to do with their semen laden testicles and the growing pain it provided. I miss the night club on the next floor up called The Mint that played extremely loud music that could be heard over all seven floors and varied from house to eighties disco to reggae and went on every night till 3 am. I miss waiting for the elevator that was programmed to get from any floor to the 7^th floor no matter how badly I needed to get from the ground floor to my room on the 3^rd floor. I miss the Thai message parlor on the 7^th floor that never shut and did a booming business on the weekend relieving the built up man fat that the men in the Asian Night Club were hefting around as a result of promises never kept. I miss the varied nationality of the men who did go up and use the Thai message parlor. Men ranging from mid-level Chinese business men to locals wearing the traditional dish-dash to Russians who couldn’t afford a hand job from one of their own but could get the works from a Thai girl. I miss seeing high end cars and SUV’s parked out front late at night with dressed up Asian men playing American gangster rap and Bollywood sound tracks head splittingly loud and waking to find beat up Toyotas and Hondas in their place. I miss the rooms with the hard as a concrete loading dock beds. I miss the toilets that were not designed to take toilet paper and to keep them from clogging you had to do what the locals did and wash out your ass with the short garden hose next to toilet all the while getting your own water diluted feces on your hand and forcing you to hopefully wash them afterwards with the small hotel soap provided that has the logo from some other hotel. I miss the state edited movies that showed no real nudity or any language that might be interrupted as an insult to God. I miss the air conditioning that when it did come on was loud enough to drown out the music seeping up from The Mint. I miss the guy from housekeeping that had a wonky eye that kept a look out for his boss while he gave me clean towels and more small bars of soap. And finally I miss the one star rating the Manhattan Hotel Dubai had and that regardless of it all they kept it shined up and displayed proudly out near the entrance so you’d have no excuse as to why things are as they are.