A view in city living

The apartment

The chute is at the end of the corridor to the right, through four doors, some serving as fire doors and others I am yet to properly determine apart from the fact that one of them is useful.

The communal living in an apartment block offers an interesting social experiment in engaging with people you don’t know but leave the evidence of both their existence and irritation.

The building we access with electronic codes and are not supposed to let anyone tailgate us into the building if they are unknown to us. Yet, we all somehow work on the premise that anyone who follows so closely behind us probably has business in the building that is unlikely to be nefarious.

The people

I am of a reticent disposition, I rarely tailgate access to a building where I am a guest, I will wait for the host to acknowledge me and give me access to the building. At certain times, my bell rings and the person at the door is unknown, to the unknown, I will not provide access, no matter the tales they have to tell.

Our post-boxes stacked on each other within a hall to the back entrance is on two sides on the walls and there is nothing as irksome as receiving junk mail, but worse still is those who drop their unneeded mail on the floor. I will be asking the concierge to keep an eye on the closed circuit television camera to catch out the culprit.

I could not help but notice that someone had taken a brutal implement to the post box for flat 27 and the door to the post box is left open, warped and damaged. It is likely that the occupant of that apartment is tenant rather than an owner because no owner would nominally exhibit such vandalism.

The chute

The room where the electricity meters are for each floor sees much activity; parcels and packages delivered to the concierge who serves many purposes including this; storing the goods in this room which is more a cubicle.

The activity in that space presages inactivity in my department, thrice goods have been stored there and in the process, the main switch to my apartment tripped off. There was a time I was away in South Africa and after the first week out of four I could no more contact my computer, well, the power had gone and with that, all was stored in my freezer went to waste with an unbearable stink.

That was a number of visits to the chute that allows every floor to send their household rubbish and waste apart from recycled stuff to the huge waste bins in the basement. You chuck your rubbish in the chute and it should slide down and land with a thud that you should hear.

Sometimes, it requires the swinging of the chute door to allow the bag fall through, yet some on my floor do not wait to see that their rubbish has left the receptacle and fallen into the bin. Usually, these are bigger than normal bags and it takes a bit of working at to let the bag fall through before you could put yours in.

The Concierge

The absence of housetraining that includes the consideration of others is evident in these bugbears, litter, rubbish, spills, smells, blockages, noise and those are just a few of the problems with sharing an apartment block. Were it not for the presence of the concierge to attend to some of these issues, existence here would have bordered on the unbearable.

This is life in the city centre, the conveniences, however, almost always outweigh the inconveniences.

A triplicate is one not three

Double Hotel Jeopardy

Back to my hotel where the thought that I would checking out in four days is the comfort I have from what makes this place a real-life Fawlty Towers.

I know I would not be returning to this hotel and neither would it receive a word of recommendation from me.

This hotel is in fact two hotels combined in one, one side being an aparthotel – a hotel of apartments called Riu Flamingo and the other part is a hotel of rooms called Riu Papayas.

If you are on foot, you will have to go through the Riu Flamingo hotel to get to he Riu Papayas part, we share the restaurant, entertainment and recreational places such that if you are served you have to give your room number and hotel you are staying in.

It would have been easier to prefix the rooms on one side with a 1 and that way they automatically know which hotel you are in.

Sick bag breakfast

The breakfast is usually quite bland that I have taken to waking up late and going out for a full English breakfast where a real-life Barbara Windsor (Peggy Mitchell) figure and better, of German extraction but the most welcoming, friendly and engaging lady of the house serves with the comforting accent of a European polyglot.

Moby’s Restaurant is about a 20-minute walk from my hotel, but I have to go through the Yumbo Centre to pick my daily which is hardly a morning paper but a brunch one. The Daily Telegraph never arrives on time for all sorts of reasons, I have been sentenced to reading either the Daily Mail or The Guardian in the absence of my newspaper – I love reading my paper at breakfast which is usually straddling the noon hours.

Moby’s Restaurant is on Avenida de Tirajana just beneath the Tenesor Apartments and you would always be welcome there, good value, variety and a big screen for football if you are so inclined.

Triplicates are for a reason

So, this morning I needed to do some ironing and after so much sign language short of sticking up a finger we came to an understanding that I needed an iron which I have to take back to my room and then move the bed a good 1.5 metres to get the cord in the wall socket which is cleverly concealed behind the television – the room is a tortuous restriction, I might as well be in a prison cell and I would have a lot more wall sockets.

I also have some laundry to do which I have to put out on Monday before 9:00AM, I would set the alarm to get up that early. I did not find any laundry slips in my room, so I asked for one only to note that the slips which are supposed to be filled in triplicate had been split so each bag had a white, pink or yellow slip.

I explained to the concierge that these things should be done in triplicate such that the white copy goes to the laundry, the pink goes to hotel administration and I retain the yellow copy to ensure my goods are safe and make the right payments.

He would hear none of it, he said, it was no more necessary, the new system was just to have one slip of the triplicate and everything else is based on trust, I would suppose.

He could not however explain to me why the mini-bar had the “old” system of triplicate forms but the laundry had just one – it makes you wonder where they get such sub-standard staff from who believe in fudging the detail and dissimulation rather than be corrected and do the right thing.

Never without Palace

There is no doubt that this double-hotel is staffed with customer-facing cretins and intelligent house-keepers, there is a split when it comes to the night-duty personnel, the one on the Riu Papayas end seems to be a very amicable person, the other on the Riu Flamingo would lie to your face – I wanted to report the issue to the manager but decided the hierarchy must be as rotten as what I encounter.

Good managers hardly end up with rotten staff, I may be wrong. Never again for Riu Papayas, Riu Flamingo and any counterpart that does not include “Palace” in the name.

In Playa del Ingles, Riu Palace Maspalomas is very much the hotel with class, the Grand Palace variety is too way out of the town centre to get a look in.