Too Rich for My Blood

So, here we are in Chicago.  I'd post pictures, but I have no camera.  Adam has one on his phone, but he ran off with it before I could upload anything.  What a schmuck.

Anyway, we somehow wound up with a room in the extremely ritzy Swissotel.  There's supposed to be a carat thing over the o in that name, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to add it.  Even the hotel restaurant is swank, but in my mind it's the bad kind of swank (everything is hideously overpriced) not the good kind (everything is really awesome).  We went there for dinner last night because after driving up here neither of us had the energy to look further afield.  Two salads and an appetizer almost broke the bank.  We often get two entrees apiece when we eat at Bob Evans in Kettering--an omelet and a salad--and it still runs us less than the price of ONE entree at this restaurant.  Yet it's not really a "nicer" place than Bob Evans in my mind--my salad was *full* of flavorless beefsteak tomatoes.  At Bob Evans I get grape tomatoes, which are much tastier.  Just something about life I don't understand.  It's a salad.  Iceberg lettuce is iceberg lettuce.  I don't care how well-trained your lettuce cutter is, the salad shouldn't cost twice as much.  There are only so many Michelin stars you can inflict on a SALAD.  The service is better at Bob Evans, too--the staff there are friendly and relaxed, while the ones at the hotel restaurant are twitchy and even a little pushy.

I'm almost afraid to leave the room, since all the other hotel guests I've seen are a.) thin and b.) extremely well-dressed.  Oh, I've seen a few in t-shirts and jeans but they are STYLISH t-shirts and jeans and I'm used to stylish people being not at all polite to big dumpy persons like myself.  Everyone I've actually run into has been extremely nice, but one day is not going to clear up a lifetime's worth of impressions.  Even if I dropped another hundred pounds to get down to a normal weight for me, I'd still be substantially bigger than pretty much everyone I've seen here.  What is it with big cities and tiny people?  I feel ridiculously overbuilt, like a Hummer at a compact car convention.

I kind of wish we were staying at the Hyatt next door--our window overlooks an extremely nice rooftop pool that I would love to take a dip in if I had a swimsuit and could miraculously drop another hundred pounds before tomorrow.  I should quit being so self-conscious.  At least I can sit in the chairs in our hotel room, although the shower is pretty confining.  I'm not sure why they decided that it'd be more luxurious to have a narrow shower and a smallish tub instead of having either a really big tub or a really big shower.  Do that many people like to take tub baths?  If they were going for the urban European effect they should have installed a bidet.

One thing I have noticed about this whole ritzy upscale thing is a real dearth of wastebaskets.  I didn't want to leave our trash in the car, so I wound up carrying it through basically the entire hotel before I could find somewhere to get rid of it.  Apparently eating out of packages is something only lower-class people do around here.  Even the WATER is expensive--we have a couple of jugs of water in our hotel room (NOT complimentary) and they cost $8.  I brought a couple of similarly-sized bottles of sparkling water from Meijer that were $0.89.  I know hotels are generally overpriced but yeesh.