Special Guest

I’m looking out from the fourteenth floor of a hotel in Taipei. This is the Pyramid Floor, according to literature I received on checking in, and is specially designed for business travelers. I didn’t know I was booked on a special floor but I’m not complaining – after all, there are fourteen extras listed for people on this floor, including complimentary buffet breakfast, broadband internet access and welcome fruits. (I think that means to eat, but you never know in a strange country…)

The “fully equipped gym” was also included but I just visited and I have to say it was some way short of fully equipped. You can always tell when a gym was set up by someone who doesn’t actually work out – the machines are all new and shiny but they don’t have the right ones. How do you forget to order a chest press machine but include about four leg machines? There’s also a stand in the corner with free-weight plates on it, all the way up to 45lb and even 55lb (25kg). Unfortunately there’s no bench or straight bar to use them. There’s a curl bar, but no-one needs that much weight for curls. And why have a curl bar when you’ve got dumbbells as well? Wouldn’t it be better to have something else instead? I bet those plates only ever get moved when someone dusts them. I know, none of this matters to most people, but it’s a shame. I’m not holding it against the hotel though – the room is excellent. Modern, clean, spacious, with exciting angles in the bathroom, a drench shower head and one of those gadget toilets that cleans your ringpiece with a water jet when you’re done.

The room also has a plasma TV, on which Pyramid Floor residents can enjoy complimentary viewing of the hotel’s pay TV service. I checked this out last night, partly because I couldn’t sleep until the Ambien kicked in, and partly because I wanted to see if they had the movie 300 (which I didn’t finish watching on the plane). What I discovered, purely in passing you understand, was that this hotel offers a full fifty channels of digital porn, presumably as another service to the “business traveler”. Apart from the astounding choice, this kind of thing also gives you a chance to see how the rest of the world lives, pornographically speaking. What I discovered is that things are different over here.

For a start everything seems to involve men in business suits and schoolgirls. I know that most women in Japan/Korea/China under the age of thirty would look like a schoolgirl if you put them in a uniform (as, indeed, would some of the men) but it still seems a bit excessive. Maybe they just thought “Hmm a lot of guys like schoolgirls, and they’ll all be business men in this hotel, so let’s get lots of those movies in!” Many of the themes of the movies are a bit “different” too, judging by the titles. I won’t reproduce them all here but let’s just say that I don’t believe any of them were endorsed by the National Organization of Women. Your typical titles on “Spanktravision” don’t have words like “rape” and “incest” in them, in my limited experience. I guess it’s possible that, as with the gym, the purchasing was done by someone who doesn’t actually use the product. I mean, I wonder whose job it is to buy porn for a hotel. Do they sit with the porn rep and go through catalogues, picking out stuff they like? What if their personal taste happens to be something exotic like, say, three hundred pound mature women with genital piercings – it’s not going to “satisfy” the average hotel guest is it?

All these special services must have been developed by someone in hotel marketing. Perhaps they had a focus group with business travelers to find out what they really like in a hotel room. Judging by what I’ve seen, the answer in Taiwan was “Complimentary coffee, a daily newspaper and a really good wank, please!” And who am I to argue with the voice of the businessman on the street?


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison