A couple of photos from our hotel room, high atop an office tower. As I've said before, it's not a very attractive city, but it's a unique bundle of urban energy and craziness that you'll only see here. The Park Hyatt is very much an oasis from what can be a very trying city. The magic starts with the elevator ride up, where the light gradually adjusts in the elevator to help you adjust from the bright outdoors to the moodily darkened public spaces of the hotel. The elevator opens into a three story atrium about 40 floors up, which many of you will know as the scene for much of the movie Lost in Translation. It's a very cool way to relax, particularly at night when the genteel tea drinking atmosphere gives way to a trendy bar scene. You then wind your way through a library/art exhibit space to the reception area. The rooms are large for Tokyo, have the best views of the city and are tastefully decorated, although on the plain side. Like most Park Hyatts, they reserve architectural statements for the public areas, and the rooms can be a bit disappointing. (I'm talkin' to you Park Hyatt Seoul). The swimming pool and gym at the top of the building in yet another atrium, with views in all directions, is also the epitome of cool. Park Hyatt (9)-Room-7, Facilities-9, Service-10, Wow-7 (killer views, the best mood lighting, and lots of intriguing decorating. One of the few places I actually bought some of the stuff in the hotel).

46. Tokyo II, June 2000

Somchai came along on business trips to Tokyo a few times. This was the first, and they start to get repetitive so it will also be the last in this blog. As you can see, he really took to the Japanese way of life, and I think he may have been a geisha in a previous life. He's standing inside our room at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, probably my favorite city hotel in the world. He's wearing the hotel bathrobe, and, hard to see but totally ridiculous, these wooden clog-like things, which are planks of wood supported on two vertical planks for no particular reason other than to make it very hard to balance on them. They're ugly, uncomfortable, impossible to walk in and really loud. Somchai saw them at an outdoor market and had to have them, saying he'd wear them all the time. So this picture is important since it's the first and last time I've ever seen them.