Newport
For Valentine's Day this year, we spent a relaxing, peaceful, romantic but above all expensive weekend in Newport in Rhode Island, about a hundred miles away. I've often said that America is like living in another dimension, but if that's true, I think this place must be where they send all the really weird things and people.
The hotel was actually much more upmarket than I was expecting for the price we paid for our room, and the first hint I got of this was when we found the car park with a sign saying "Please proceed to attendant". After driving down the length of the tarmac, passing all the free spaces, we found the attendant standing on the front steps and he had us hand over the keys so that he could drive the car back up the way we had come and park it. When we left the building later, we would be greeted on the front steps by him again, with our car visible five feet away in the nearest parking space - and he would dash off to his hut for the keys, insist that he would "bring the car around for us", get in and drive it the seven seconds over to the front steps before letting us in.
During the entire weekend, the weather was at the most absolutely freezing it's been this year, making it quite uncomfortable to walk around outside even in a heavy jacket - so the trips we made away from the hotel were to tour a couple of the mansions that were built in the area in the 19th century. The streets towards the north end of the town are bordered by twenty-foot-high gates barring the way up driveways through huge estates - these are absolute bastions of excess, owned by people who were rich and wanted other people to know about it. I thought my parents' house in Inverurie was big, but the front hall of one of these places could have fit that entire building into it.
One of them had been lived in up until only about fifty years ago, when the person who owned it sold it to the historical society for $100,000 having acquired his business sense from Jack and the Beanstalk. We were led around by a clearly mad woman who talked like her tape was running at too high a speed and frequently wandering off the topic of the vast paintings and decorations in front of us, while I found myself distracted by the sheer number of naked statues in every room. There's a boundary line between being an appreciator of art and decorating your house in wall-to-wall tits, some of which are on women half-morphed into sort of sphinx statues. And as we passed the huge fountain visible through the back window, our tour guide summarized it with "That's Aphrodite, and in the summer, water shoots out of her boobs".
The other house tour concentrated more on how the people in it lived, having the sheer cheek to use these palatial buildings just as summer houses and having two separate titanic dining rooms for formal and informal occasions. The custom then was for ladies to have five or six dresses that they would change between each day, for morning, lunch, afternoon, dinner and evening wear, each of which would take most of that period of the day to be put on to you by a team of servants - it must have looked like a really slow Formula 1 pit stop. People think that we waste our lives on the Internet now, but it's notable, as I also implied above, that high class living has always been characterized by taking up your time with things that are quite so pointless.
Just staying in that kind of environment for 24 hours was quite nice, though - we had a corner room with a view out to the sea, a television which didn't really work (therefore in my personal ideal state), and our room was decorated with books that had been bought seemingly at random from a second-hand bookshop, including volume 14 of the Britannica Macropaedia and Nixon and Kissinger by Robert the Dalek. We were told that the hotel owner had a quirk of leaving a Dr. Seuss book in every room - ours was a posthumous one describing (now inaccurately) the planets in our solar system.
One of the other things that we got with our weekend package was advertised as a "jelly bath", which had been described as a unique experience with a formula that turned water in a soaking tub into a thick heat-retaining gel. What we were actually provided was, honestly, a cupcake wrapped in a plastic box, handmade in Washington with "DO NOT EAT" printed on it - the total effect of which was to turn the water slightly pink. I don't want to dwell on this, but think of it this way - if you'd gone to a birthday party at eight years old, been promised jelly and then been served a bowl of soup, I'm sure that you would have been similarly unimpressed. Even if it was strawberry-flavoured.