Prices, bag, etc.
Wrote this entry this morning (maybe 16 action-packed hours ago), didn't get a chance to post it 'til now. (I feel bad now about having said negative things about the hotel in this entry, because the night clerk was just very nice to me. But I may as well post what I wrote.)
I have no razor, of course; that was in the checked bag. Luckily, my hotel made clear in its about-the-hotel info that if I'm missing any small toiletries (specifically including a razor), I can buy them from the hotel. It even helpfully included a price list.
So just now, without having showered yet, I put on yesterday's clothes, and got in the extremely small and extremely slow elevator, and went down to the lobby.
Where I asked if I could buy a razor. The woman behind the desk went into the back room and then came out and told me they don't have any.
So I asked her the other question on my mind. Since I'm in Scotland, I'll use the dialogue-punctuation style favored by both of the Scottish authors we've published:
—I need to call the airport to ask after my lost bag. Can I do that from my room phone?
—Yes, she said.
—And do you charge for local calls? I asked.
—Yes, there's a charge.
—How much is it, then?
—For a phone call of about five or ten minutes, it's two pounds.
She seemed distinctly uncomfortable during all this, as if she weren't used to having to answer questions from strangers. Or maybe I sweated more while traveling than I thought.
Anyway. My real point is:
Two effing quid for a five-minute phone call?
Only I didn't say that aloud.
(Last night Justine told me I was sounding Canadian. I said it must be the Scottish influence. Because I keep wanting to use Scottish intonations when I say things, and I keep resisting because I wouldn't do it properly, would I? But they start to permeate my brain. Like reading Chaucer in the original, or doing cryptic crosswords.)
(I got a fair bit of sleep last night, but it doesn't appear to have reduced the amount of free-associating I'm doing.)
Anyway. What I'm saying is that 70¢ a minute for a local call from a hotel room seems outrageous to me. I wonder whether (a) I'm out of touch with hotel phone rates, (b) phone rates are higher here, (c) my hotel has unusually high phone rates, and/or (d) the front desk clerk had no clue and so made something up. [Added later: the pay phone at the convention center is something like 10p/minute, so the answer is not (b).] [And is p the abbreviation for new pence? Or is the abbreviation still d?]
I did, by the way, call the airport; they said the latest shipment of bags have arrived but are going through customs, and they'll call me (presumably by calling my hotel) when/if they know more. Not surprising; the guy yesterday said to wait 'til 2 p.m. to call, and it's only a little after 11 a.m. now. But I figured better to call now in case the guy was wrong and I needed to embark on a bureaucratic odyssey.
Which reminds me: one of the items on the "International E/D Card" we had to fill out on the flight to Glasgow (which turned out to be the wrong card entirely, so we had to fill out a different one while standing in line at Customs) was "Port of Embarkation." And I couldn't figure out whether they meant "City you started in," "City you're most recently coming from," or "City you're arriving in." That last seems unlikely, except that the other lines in that box are labeled "Intended Address" and "Purpose of visit." Wacky. So I just put my whole itinerary on the "Port of Embarkation" line and hoped for the best. And I guess the best happened: it was the wrong form, so nobody ever saw it.
Wanted to note one other thing as an addendum to last night's entry: I know it's kind of pathetic to start getting twitchy about lack of Internet access after only 24 hours. But I think a lot of it is just that I like having connections to familiar people and places. Which is why things got so much better when I started running into people I knew yesterday, even the ones I only knew from online. In other words, I think a lot of my tension had to do with being in a strange place, surrounded by unfamiliar things and people who I'm having a harder time understanding than I expected, even though we speak the same language (I seem to recall finding it easier to understand the Edinburgh accent; I keep wondering whether the locals here find my American accent hard to understand, and what I can do to make myself easier to understand), and without being sure that my stuff will arrive before it's time for me to go home again, so I really wanted the comforting familiarity of email and the web. And was feeling further cut off by lack of cell phone. And lack of sleep wasn't helping either.
Oh, I forgot to say yesterday: Thanks to Tom G, for (a) being the first familiar face I encountered after 20 hours of travel, and (b) immediately offering me, if not the shirt actually off his back, the loan of some clothing if mine doesn't arrive. Very much appreciated.
One more thing: my umbrella is in my checked bag. Sigh.
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