noplasticshowers

My friend Sammy has an expression that I enjoy reusing, pretending to have invented it myself. He often says, “that was pretty not bad.” You have to read between the ambiguity and grok the context to figure out what that means. Just to make thing even more ambiguous, I recently determined that the Qube hotel in Heidelberg is either “pretty not good” or “pretty not bad” depending on how much rum you have in your system.

The conference where I gave a keynote this week is held at the Print Media Academy (which just so happens to have the best mixology in Heidelberg that I have yet to come across). So I switched hotels, moving away from the heart of town at the the arthotel. It was not the most clever move.

The Qube has aspirations to be a hipster hotel, but their construction budget does not allow them to reach their vision. Case in point, though the rooms have great layout and windows, the furniture is veneer, the glass shelves (!) in the bathroom are several hundreds of mils too thin, the flat screen TV is small enough to be swallowed up by the wall, the curtains can’t be set up to block the morning light, the shower cube floor is plastic and makes a very unsatisfying sound when water cascades down on it, and the twenty-something bartender is utterly harmless (and quite possibly a waste of oxygen). The qube hotel does not suck, but it does not rock either.

Gorgeous skylights provide a perfect view of ikea grade furniture.

The spartan decor is nicely assembled, but just a smidgen too cheap.

Das German bed...no sharing covers!

The bathroom has plenty of tile and glass. It looks better in website pictures than it feels in practice.

Glass cube shower = good. Thin wobbly door with plastic seals = bad. Shower controls = good. Noisy plastic floor = bad.

More bathroom.

One more rant and I will be done. The Euro-hotel-Internet can’t save state (they try to write down your MAC address but then they throw out the paper). Re-authenticating every time you close your laptop lid is very silly. I have so many Internet credential scraps of paper that I feel like an absentminded professor.

So now some good stuff. The Troopers con put on a great dinner followed by a packet wars contest. The second best part of the evening was the live electronica created in realtime as a soundtrack. The best part was the miraculous appearance of a bottle of Mt Gay 1703 rum (a blend of 10 to 30 year old rum with a delicious sweet finish). Quite possibly that bottle was the best rum in Germany…it is gone of course.

Micele mixes music under the influence of superior rum.

And some more good stuff from the next night. After the conference, the speakers were invited on a trip up the Neckar river for dinner. Excellent scenery, great food, and fun conversation.

A quick walk from the boat back to Print Media revealed a wild scene. Velvet ropes, pulsing Euro-“music,” zillions of bleach blonds wriggling to the “music,” too many beautiful people and posers per square foot, and a mob scene. The hacker boyz were denied entrance through the main door even though they had on VIP bracelets. (Their pants were not expensive enough…and the big flag they were carrying did not help.) Since I had on my all black uniform, I walked right in. Long story short about the evening, the bartenders got the memo, and Seelbachs were available (after proper authentication) thanks to the miraculous procurement of some Peychaud’s bitters in Munich. That’s a funny story all to itself with a bartender turing from a raging dick into an obsequious dog in a split second. Hah! A good time was had by all. The power of the Troopers staff was obvious.

Friday night with excellent friends was the best so far. Good luck with the creature you guys.

And Saturday was great too, with another flying expedition from the metropolitan Kirn airstrip.

Gunter and the plane. 80 HP is enough to fly.

Cockpit.

Ultimately, we’ll give the Qube a high three showerheads rating, which in the strong Heidelberg hotel market makes you fall right off the list.