Monday, May 18, 2009

Hotel Photos - Hotos, or Photels?

Last week I was sent on assignment with one of my coworkers to cover an event sponsored by one of JMU's institutes. I won't make any comments about the symposium itself, as to maintain professional balance when talking about work on a personal, yet public blog. What I will do is post a link to the facebook page and Twitter feed we set up to cover the event in near real-time. It was an experimental trial for us using social media in new ways, and I'll let others judge how successful our first attempt was.

But that's not the real point of this post, as you could probably guess from its title. The symposium spanned two days, and they put us up in a nice hotel in D.C., the Grand Hyatt. I was pleased with that in an of itself, but when I checked in Tuesday, it got even better. Since we were fairly early, the hotel didn't have the entire block of rooms in our group ready, and they offered to upgrade me to the "Congressional Suite" at no extra cost. Below are some photos of said room.


Central sitting area



Entertainment area with flat-screen TV and stereo



Full bar (not stocked)



Powder room? (Little area outside bathroom)



Breakfast nook/work area



Pool table!


And, finally below is a shot of the sign of the crappy hole-in-the-wall Chinese joint we ate lunch at in Chinatown. The food was substandard, but the name was too good to pass up.

5 comments:

Hot Topologic said...

The sign says

xin da wang jiu jia

at least as far as I can tell.

That does indeed mean

new big (wang) restaurant. Curiously, that third character, meaning "lustrous" or "prosperous," seems to be read "wang," but the sign clearly says "wong." I don't see that listed as a reading in either Mandarin or Cantonese, so I don't know what's up with the change.

kilgore said...

Perhaps they were somewhat aware of the English connotation of the American connotation of the original. That, of course, begs the question as to why they wouldn't just scrap the name all together and go with something altogether more appetizing.

Hot Topologic said...

Yeah, as somebody who lives in an Asian country, I am constantly amazed at how incomprehensible people from another culture's thought processes can be.

PopsArmstrong said...

A pool table???? In a hotel room? Cool! Did you play?

kilgore said...

Ya we definitely played several games of pool. All horribly.