I expected that the Hotel Lotus would be a bit past its prime, but I couldn't understand why the stylish art deco building shown on the website looked so different from the place where I had just agreed to spend the next week. When I went back to the website for a closer look, I saw that the hotel in the picture was surrounded by huge American cars with chrome fins. It was the same place, but the photo had been taken more than fifty years ago. Very clever, Hotel Lotus.
From what I've seen in Cairo, the only real difference between a budget hotel and a hostel is the latter has an extra "s." So I was pleased that the Lotus, while no longer anything like the place advertised on its homepage, actually feels like a hotel.
In practical terms this means two things: that my toilet is en suite and that the hotel has a bar. Other than the bartender, who napped quietly at his post, the grandly named 'Polo Bar' was empty for my first visit. I dropped by again the following day and was rewarded with a much livelier scene. I was barely through the door before a friendly Canadian couple bought me a beer and gave me a Winter Olympics update, which unsurprisingly didn't get a lot of coverage here. That they wanted to talk to an American at all told me all I needed to know about the hockey results.
A visit to the Polo Bar has since become my late afternoon habit. I normally have a shot of the local rum mixed generously with Pepsi. In this case, two wrongs do make a right, and I like the drink much more than I'd have thought given how little I like either of its components. I've since realized that they carry Coke too, but I've got it in my head that substituting one of the ingredients will throw off the calculus of the mix and then I'll have to go back to beer. In Egypt, this means the ubiquitous Stella, which shouldn't be confused with the Stella that's sold everywhere else in the world. Egyptian Stella is conceived, brewed, bottled and sold only here and so long as it's freezing cold, is not half bad. At room temperature it's a different animal and is completely intolerable. Nights out will end because the place serving drinks has run out of icy Stella and has started serving only cool Stella.
Speaking of intolerable, let me tell you about Omar Khayam, the most popular (and usually the only) wine option. This stuff is awful and I say this as someone who will never be accused of being a wine snob. I firmly believe that the only reason anyone has ever been able to finish an entire bottle is because the senses, in an act of self preservation, shut down at the first mouthful. All you feel when you drink Omar Khayam is a slight sensation of warmth in your lower back, which you'd think would be more terrifying than it is. It's unbelievably bad, but it's also unnecessarily bad. The Coptic population drinks wine and so do millions upon millions of annual tourists. Why doesn't someone fill this niche? Tunisia manages to produce a few bottles of decent wine and for a much smaller drinking population. Ugh, this stuff is so bad that I want to bring a case home to silence the doubters.
Really, what I'd prefer is a nice whisky, but the few bottles on the Polo Bar's shelf have cracked and peeled labels that have yellowed with age. Somehow, despite being obviously ancient, their contents don't lessen no matter how much people drink. I don't want to slander my hotel, but my math tells me that a bottle of scotch can't still be full after thirty years of pouring two glasses a day from it. My guess is that it isn't Dewar's that's going into the Dewar's bottle every night. Sometimes it's wisest to stick with the simple beer you know, rather than the clever scotch who won't say who he really is.
I'm not sure how this became a discussion on alcohol, but here we are. I've just changed the title of the post to make it look intentional.
Anyway, what I meant to say is that I'm generally pretty pleased with the place. In anticipation of Ms. Chadha's arrival at the end of the week, I'm moving to the Lotus's sister-hotel, the more upscale Windsor. If it's nicer than this place, it ought to be pretty adequate indeed. It will be interesting to judge just how far my standards have fallen by comparing the looks on our faces when they take us to our room.
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