a very disappointing Austin, day 4
Midway through yesterday -- before Xanadu -- we've come to our new digs at the Marriott Renaissance hotel here in the whitebread Austin suburbs. It's very much like all the locations in The Business of Strangers -- a huge central courtyard ringed by rooms, all very anonymous and catering to the discriminating business traveler with 30 or so on-demand porno movies. (And no, there will be no discreet anonymous charges showing up on our bill.) At least there's a small gym and heated pool here to work off the excesses of the past few days.
We help prepare the bride's house for impending wedding madness, which doesn't take as much time as we'd thought; we marvel at the fact that all the two and three-story houses on the block cost around $300K, and then Mer ferries me back to the hotel, thinking I can amuse myself for four hours in a hotel with wireless internet access and an upscale strip mall nearby.
Oh, how wrong she was.
The access is expensive and nowhere is it free; the mall loses its novelty extremely quickly; the ladies took the car to go do womanly things, so I have nowhere to go; it's lonely being by yourself in an anonymously disturbing hotel.
I would've crapped in Mer's shoes had I been more pissed off. Left alone for four hours with nothing to do. Sheesh.
And this is what they were doing while I was having my silent scream -- that picture to the left happens to be a plastic straw shaped like a penis. It's a picture of a pornographic Statue of Liberty.
At least after Mer came to collect me -- and after I had coated the room in my own feces in frustration -- we all went out to Z Tejas where we once again gorged ourselves.
And the groom's mom, bless her, must have had telepathy. She gave the ladies artistically-wrought metal pens, and she gave me a full deck of cards with cocktail recipes on each card. The ace of spades is a white russian; the joker, water and ice. This gift couldn't have made me happier.