Overall, my stay at the luxury resort has been uninspiring. It’s a run-of-the-mill deluxe resort with the pool/sauna/swim-up bar, etc. The kind of place where you get nickel and dimed on everything. For instance, for the in-room safe, I had to pay R$4. I got the safe for FREE in the R$38 hostel room. I guess you can make the argument that the nice hotel is already safe, but come-on people, it’s not like you had to put the safe in special for me.

The hotel’s restaurant is overpriced and crappy. Last night, there was a buffet and the theme was japanese/sushi. The sushi was pretty low grade and the other dishes were crappy. I laughed and cried at the same time because the fried rice was labeled “Chop Suei”. During dinner, we were blessed with the soft sounds of the brazilian equivalent of “The Captain & Tennille” (minus the captains’ hat). It wasn’t that they were trying to be like C & T, they were just shitty and the guy was playing a casio. He was sweating profusely and misusing the “break” button to add some flava. The woman was sitting on a stool the whole time and didn’t move her head the entire time I watched.

The whole experience made me think that I was on some kind of cruise ship run aground in Salvador, but the passengers are oblivious and keep on with their merriment. For the rest of the night and for all of today I couldn’t help but see the cruise ship mentality throughout the hotel. Everything is just a little extra cheesy like “a band with every meal” (TM). There always seems to be a buffet. People don’t seem to really leave the “ship” much. The only saving grace has been the woman serving the lobby bar area who I would like to call mãe (mom). She is super friendly with everyone and everyone who seems to know her gets hugs and kisses and big hardy laughs. Seriously, she’s the only reason I am still in the “lobby bar” (besides not having a good place to go for the next 2 hours).

So I’m sitting in the lobby right now with about 2 hours before I need to go to the airport for my 2:45am flight. There’s a guy playing a guitar to no audience. He’s actually pretty good, but it’s still cheesy. There’s another bar downstairs called the “Boite Bar”. I tried looking up the translation from Portuguese to English, but I couldn’t find it. However, in french, google tells me it means “limp”. I checked it out before at 10 and it was totally empty. Maybe it doesn’t really get going until later on after it takes it’s little blue pill. I’ll go check it out in a bit.

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