Birka Thoughts

[anastasiav]

First, and with apologies to mylisant and kr4sh and staceyspins and many, many more of you out there in LJ land whom I got to see, my Birka Experience really, in the weight of it, was fairly sucky. I'm sorry. But its not your fault.

Second, a big apology to herooftheage for standing him up for our chivalric date on Friday night ... I had a good reason, as you'll see in a moment, and I did come upstairs rather much later in the evening than I had planned, but all was quiet and the room service menu was already hung on the door, so I did not knock for fear of waking you or your lady.

Things I enjoyed about Birka: Seeing Miles get his Pelican; Seeing Gareth be Knighted, Gareth's entire Knighting ceremony (in particular Sir Mo's awesome speech, hiding in my room and sleeping Saturday night; gifts from staceyspins and evilnicola, the Pit of Despair Power and Water meeting, seeing many people; the family procession in black and white.

Things I did not enjoy about Birka: The mouse that jumped out of the heater in our room and then consumed three hours of our Friday night (they did comp our room for the night, but we had to catch the mouse ourselves because the backup-assistant-night-manager they sent up was not equal to the task); any dealings I had with the hotel in general (although the staff was nice, polite, and well meaning I still got the runaround on many basic requests); all the work we had to do to rearange our room into a vigil site and then back again (I'm happy to do it, but it was hard not having a place to escape to; plus we had tried and tried to get a different/bigger/adjoining room for the vigil back in October but the hotel stymied us at every turn -- although rooms like we asked for clearly did exist, just on the 12th floor); all the angst surrounding Miles' returning his squire's belt, not getting to go shopping for more than 15 minutes; no game playing; being exhaused all the time; large portions of court; not getting to spend more than 10 minutes talking to anyone.

I so wanted to have a good time. And I did have good moments. But I spent the vast bulk of the weekend feeling as though I was doing things that I needed to do for other people, and not things that I wanted to do for myself and my own fun, and I hate hate hate that feeling.

Comments

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

I'd have gladly helped arrange a suite for you. What run around did they give you about that?

They basically told us at various times that there was a suite available, but it was, like, $500 (I presume this was the presidental suite), that there really wasn't anything available, that there was a room available but for Saturday after 3pm only, etc. etc. etc. I honestly felt at times like they had no idea what the rooms were like or how they were sorted in their own hotel -- however, I do also know for a fact that most of the time we ended up talking to folks in a call center somwhere and not people in Manchester themselves.

In the end, we thought we had booked two rooms (a king and a room w/two double beds) that had an adjoining door, and had confirmed that a couple of times, but then when we arrived we were scattered all over the hotel. Using our room ended up working fine, if a bit cramped, but my main problem was the dealing with the Radisson people was always such a frustrating experience.

I did have a long talk with the manager-on-duty (Natalia) today before we left, after they refused to honor my request for a delayed check out time, despite my being a Gold Points member. I think I pretty well explained to her the problems we had (including the mouse) and she has my name and contact info.

FYI, also, ours was not the only mouse sighted this weekend ... I know of at least one other person who saw one running around in the lobby near the elevators and another one down by the parking garage. They ought to check into that, they have something of a problem.

[villa-sorelle.livejournal.com]

I also had issues with the hotel. I spoke with the hotel staff when I booked my room for Birka, not the call center. When I arrived they told me the room i booked for Vigil was not 94.00 dollars as quoted but, 225.00 for the night, and I couldn't get it until after 1pm.

Luckily, we came to an arrangement, and I got the room at 11am, but I did not get my quoted price.