Elegance, Bright Sunshine, Pleasantly cool weather, an amazing atmosphere, are all just a few of the various characteristics the town of
Offering you the best value and fun for your dollar is our goal. We are a newly opened hostel in San Diego’s trendy East Village district. Our whole hostel has been renovated. We offer FREE Internet, FREE weekly Gaslamp walking tour and a FREE weekly Pub Crawl. FREE all you can make waffle breakfast every morning and every Sunday we have FREE Hot dogs. We also offer FREE tea and coffee all day. Please read the reservation conditions below BEFORE making a reservation. Our…
The beauty of Les Borjs de la Kasbah is that it is completely unexpected, slap in the middle of one of the busiest and dirtiest bits of Marrakesh. To get to this boutique hotel involves a short drive from the airport, in all likelihood in a taxi with no seatbelts, along roads that bear a closer resemblance to alleyways than thoroughfares, even if they do seem to hold the same amount of traffic as the average high street back home.
Eventually, you pitch up at the door and think ‘This can’t be it’, because it’s far too unprepossessing, looking as if it might be a hostel of some sort, not the environment-friendly spa-hotel you think you’ve booked. However, once you’re inside, Les Borjs is chic and entirely peaceful - you can just about hear the call to prayer, but that’s it.
As my sister, Katy, and I arrived on a Saturday morning after just six hours’ travelling door-to-door, we met Françoise Bruce-Mitford, one of the owners, who designed and built Les Borjs with her British husband to prevent them becoming bored when they retired from running their holiday company, VFB Holidays.
Though based in Wales, she comes over at least once a month for a few days, which in itself goes to show how easy it is to get to Marrakesh for a long weekend, as we were doing. It seemed incredible that we had been in freezing Britain that morning and here we were drinking freshly squeezed fruit juices and peeling off layers in the 24C sunshine.
Les Borjs is now a year old, and when setting it up the Bruce-Mitfords were concerned to use as many environment-friendly, energy-efficient and all-round ethical ploys as they could in both the spa and the main hotel. Much of the electricity comes from solar panels, and rubbish is disposed of in as eco-conscious a manner as possible. Even the lowliest potwasher in the kitchen is paid nearly double the statutory minimum wage, and the couple are involved in several local charities.
Not that the hotel feels uncomfortably worthy in any sense. Although more or less built from scratch on the sites of seven houses the couple bought over a period of years, the new buildings do look quintessentially Moroccan, all twiddly ironwork, latticed windows, polished plasterwork, traditional rugs and painted tiles - they used a local architect and entirely Moroccan crafts team.
The 18 bedrooms are sympathetically finished and normal hotel luxuries aren’t stinted on: you still get a flat-screen telly and a minibar, but little notes gently encourage you not to use too much hot water, and toiletries are in dispensers rather than disposable bottles. Lighting operates by motion sensors, so corridors are lit only when they need to be
Marriott Hotel Description With a spectacular waterfront setting in the heart of America*s Finest City, the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina truly represents the area*s best location for business and leisure. Immerse yourself in the vibrant activity that surrounds our downtown Marriott - which conveniently sits adjacent to the convention center and the Gaslamp Quarter District. Enjoy effortless access to the city*s most famous sights from Petco Park to the sparkling beaches. By offering…
“So, what’s new in Bangkok?” I ask my friend Rungsima Kasikranund during a recent visit to Thailand’s capital. “Spas, Latin dancing, and coffee bars,” she replies offhandedly, as if to preclude any tiresome questions about good places for pad thai or upcoming temple festivals. Her answer—as well as her chic black outfit and the minimalist café in which we’re sitting—tells me that Bangkok is, if not yet hip, then certainly on the cusp of hip.
A hip Bangkok would be only the latest in a series of reincarnations this Buddhist city has undergone in the space of a few decades. Over the last 30 years, it has tripled in population and metamorphosed from a drowsy Asian backwater (quite literally: only a few feet above sea level, it’s often flooded in monsoon season) to a densely populated, plugged-in metropolis.
The Vietnam War was responsible for Bangkok’s most notorious rebirth—as a city of pleasure for the American soldiers who poured in looking for R&R. Backpackers followed, then tour groups and high-end travelers. I started visiting in the mid-1980’s, in time to witness Bangkok’s next, decidedly tonier, incarnation, when Thailand was one of Asia’s economic “tigers” and the expanding middle class suddenly had money to burn. The Oriental hotel opened a spa that set a new gold standard for pampering. And Ed Tuttle, who designed the Amanpuri and Amandari resorts (in Phuket and Bali, respectively), created the fabulous Sukhothai hotel in 1991—still my favorite place to stay.
But my enthusiasm for the city waned in direct correlation to its booming economy. Newspapers reported that the number of cars on Bangkok’s overburdened roads was growing by nearly 500 a day. A friend told me she once abandoned her car on a gridlocked street to go off to dinner and returned an hour later only to find that traffic hadn’t budged. The glut of construction projects made the congestion and air pollution even worse. Headlines told of government scandals, of Buddhist monks accused of sexual and financial improprieties, of the growing AIDS epidemic. In 1991, I sat out a military coup in a hotel coffee shop, sipping Singha beer while tanks rolled down the street. A few years later, I got caught in a late monsoon, and had to wade through streets flooded with filthy water. Back at my hotel, I threw out my shoes and vowed never to return to Bangkok.
A few months later the Thai economy collapsed and the baht lost almost half its value against the dollar. And Bangkok was reborn, gradually, yet again, as a poorer but gentler city—one that I’ve now come back to rediscover.
The café where Rungsima has asked me to meet her is the latest outpost in the Greyhound chain, itself a spin-off of a popular local fashion line of the same name. Right now, it is the coolest place to hang out in Bangkok, and the perfect place for her to show off her city to a New York journalist. Rungsima, the editor-in-chief of the Thai edition of Elle Decor, was born in Bangkok but educated abroad, and is well-traveled and well-connected. Greyhound’s cappuccinos are good, its menu is an Asian-Western fusion, and its clientele a mix of stylish shoppers and twentysomethings clutching cell phones and sporting creative hairdos. A tongue-in-cheek sign on the wall proclaims it a NO BULLSHITTING NO BACKSTABBING NO GOSSIPING NO SMOKING AREA.