Shower curtains redux

So it turns out a lack of shower curtains isn’t an Australian thing; it’s a crappy hotel thing. We’re staying at the somewhat anticlimactic Holiday Inn Potts Point: big room, working bathroom doors, shower curtains, nice bed. It’s right next to Kings Cross, Sydney’s red-light district, which travel sites and several of Natasha’s Australian relatives all said is a dangerous, loud place, but we’ve had no problems. The hotel itself is tucked away slightly from the action, making it an oasis of calm.

The only unusual thing about the hotel is that we’ve had to take the elevator to our first-floor room because we can’t find the stairs. More accurately, we can’t find a door to the streets that doesn’t set off the fire alarm when it’s opened.

I sure hope they don’t have security cameras on that particular door. Man, was that an annoying sound.

It was good practice, though, since the next morning everyone had to evacuate the hotel briefly because of a fire alarm. If you’ve ever wondered what a hotel fire alarm sounds like, initially, it’s actually a pleasant intermittent beeping sound that I mistook for a hidden clock radio (I had just woken up; Natasha was finishing up in the bathroom), only it was coming from the ceiling.

That was the it-could-be-a-fire pre-buzzer. The actual you’re-all-going-to-die earsplitter followed. Not pleasant. So we grabbed our valuables (passports, digital camera, Apple products; we left behind: our Australian wines and my coursework) and joined a calm queue of other guests as we assembled at the designated rescue place behind the hotel. It was all so orderly it could have taken place at a Canadian university.

(Photo: Sydney's firies keeping us safe from harm.)