Page Six reports that rocker Chris Cornell, formerly of Audioslave, and his wife were staying at the upscale hotel when their hotel room was flooded. What?? How does a hotel room far away from a beach get flooded? Here's how:
A pal of Cornell's said, "after performing in front of a sold-out 20,000-capacity arena*, Chris returned to his room and was relaxing with Vicky when the walls started trembling, like in an earthquake. Then, Chris smelled something burning, and suddenly, the entire entrance of the hallway collapsed and gallons of freezing cold water entered the room. Within a matter of moments, Chris and his wife were up to their knees in water . . . They finally scrambled out but lost a lot of stuff."
Yikes! A rep for Cornell said the couple lost about $30,000 worth in valuables. Hopefully, the Faena will be able to recuperate that for them. Still no word on exactly why this place flooded.
* Chris' pal sure knows about how to promote his sold-out 20,000-capacity arena performance.
If your dream New Year's Eve celebrations involve a hotel which is hip (or crazy) enough to have a few rooms decked out in Barbie and Hot Wheels themes, then heading south to the Hilton Buenos Aires is the plan for you come December 31.
There's a big event on at the Buenos Aires Hilton if you stay for New Year's Eve and book their special package. You'll get a room facing the lobby, with NYE dinner served on the balcony area so you can watch the lobby show.
After dinner, you're invited to the Buen Ayre ballroom for a post-midnight party, Buenos Aires style (that means hard!). The package also includes private car pick up and drop off to the airport.
As well as the Barbie and Hot Wheels rooms, the Hilton is still talking about its recent renovations, which included upgrades to pretty much everything: suites, dining outlets, spa, health club, and so on.
A three-night New Year's Eve package, including dinner and the party, will set you back just $399 plus taxes.
Finisterra is actually a fine looking place, even if everything has been ordered from Boutique Fittings Ltd. The main draw is the location, in Las Cañitas, yet another Palermo sub-barrio.
Las Cañitas has thrived lately as a neighborhood for nightclubs, shops, sushi restaurants and bars for the "young and beautiful" so says Ian Mount of the New York Times, who reviewed the hotel for the paper's "Check In, Check Out" column.
Spoiled little kids everywhere, rejoice: you too can be Barbie herself or a Hot Wheels driver for a night.
This summer, the Hilton Buenos Aires is bringing back its Barbie hotel room (first debuted in 2004), decked out in floor-to-ceiling pink and virtually every Barbie-themed novelty item Mattel currently manufactures. Little guests even arrive at the room baller-style in a Barbie car and can opt to spend some time in the spa getting a Princess Makeover. Pass the purple eyeshadow, please!
For the teeny car fans, they've also launched the world's first Hot Wheels room, outfitted with racing tracks, a race car bed (obvi), video games and walkie talkies.
Hey parents: either the walkie-talkies or the pink and purple color palette is gonna get old real fast, so we suggest you book the available adjoining rooms and let your children run amok in their own personal Mattel heavens. The themed rooms run about $150 a night.
Buenos Aires not an option? Through September 2, the Hilton Toronto has the same Barbie & Hot Wheels rooms for CAD$229 per night including breakfast-- around $215 US.
And for the record, Hilton's press release didn't reinforce any gender stereotypes. That's right little girls, nobody will judge you if you stay in the Hot Wheels room! Or if little boys wanna stay in the Barbie room.
[Ed. Note: We have gotten a few questions about finding a hotel in Buenos Aires that are not-so-noisy, so naturally we hit up our resident Argentina hotel expert, Matt Chesterton, for his suggestions. Enjoy.]
BA stands for Buenos Aires. It could equally well stand for Bad Acoustics. This is one of the world's noisiest cities. Several street intersections make the global top 20 of eardrum-shattering junctions. On a recent trip to London we were stunned by how quiet the city centre was. That's how loud BA is.
Several readers have asked us to recommend some 'quiet hotels' in BA. It's a good question to ask and a tricky one to answer. For one thing, you can't assume that a hotel in a quiet neighborhood is a quiet hotel. The Hotel Panamericano, for example, overlooks the world's widest boulevard, Avenida 9 de Julio. But their rooms are so well soundproofed you can hear a pin drop in them. (If you want to test this out, go ahead; just be sure to pick the pin up afterwards or you're bound to tread on it.)
Award-winning Home Hotel, on the other hand, is in a peaceful neighborhood of cobblestoned streets and one-story housing, far away from major traffic arteries. But they have a lively bar and cocktail garden (over which the rooms are tightly clustered) and party-oriented guests. A group of LA advertising execs in full braying mode is, in the noise pollution stakes, a match for any number of low-flying fighter jets. And way more annoying.
There are good reasons why business people stay in 'business hotels'. They tend to be quieter, regardless of the location. They tend to have more rooms than boutique hotels, so you can easily ask for a room change if you want one. Larger three-star establishments are rarely double glazed or soundproofed but usually have quiet rooms (often the ones with a view of the parking lot).
Golden rule: If a hotel describes itself as having a 'chilled atmosphere' or anything along those lines, you can guarantee it's about as quiet as a recently kicked beehive.
For the past two weeks, we've been spotlighting some of the best hotels Buenos Aires has to offer courtesy of Matt Chesterton. Like all good things, the mini-Buenos Aires guide had come to an end. But this morning we found a little present in our inbox---a reader's own hotel review.
In last week's "Thinkers' Guide to Buenos Aires", Matt profiled the "glamorous, rude, fading and grand" Castelar Hotel, and more specifically his wedding night there where the helpful staff did not discriminate against him for projectile vomiting on the suite's walnut paneling.
He is not alone--in his high regard for the hotel that is. As for the vomiting on wedding night, we won't go there. Anyways, one reader sent us his own take on the Castelar which he titled "Tattered, not torn" in reference to the hotel's wear and tear but which did not seem to bother him.
A few years ago right after the economy crashed we booked a small apt for a week. The apt turned out to smaller than small and dirtier than dirt. The city was vibrating with protest marches and rooms were hard to find. The Castelar was less than a block away and had a junior suite. All the Argentine charm we wished for and a staff that new how to spell service.
We asked for help booking tickets to a Tango show. The tickets were booked and transportation arranged. We were told to be back at the hotel at a certain time and a car would pick us up. The time did not meet with our other plans and we suggested if we could have the tickets now we would take a taxi from another location. The concierge insisted we return to the hotel and take the car he had arranged. If we did not he would cancel the tickets. The reason: his transportation was the only form that could be trusted.
When we got to the show we were delighted he had insisted. We might have gotten there with another cab but I doubt we would have gotten back to the hotel with all our belongings! At the Castelar you are really treated as family.
So there you have it. Sometimes the best hotel service isn't always found in a shiny and new building.
Travel writer Matt Chesterton may know more about the Buenos Aires hotel scene than anyone else on the planet, our words not his. When he isn't hiding from his creditors he is out and about in BA. For the next two weeks he will be busting myths and spouting off about the BA hotel scene. For starters, he has told us that La Cabaña is not the best steakhouse in Argentina, and rather, a national embarrassment, the kind of place that in previous epochs of "our" history would have been firebombed--reserved for Steakhouse Suckers, his words, not ours. This is exactly the kind of unadulterated sentiment you can expect to find here in the next couple of weeks--plus he is hilarious. If you wish to use this time to ask him a burning question you have about BA hotels, shoot it our way, and we will hand deliver it to him. Enjoy.
Youkali Kultur Hotel
All good things must come to an end, and so must all mediocre ones. We have reached the terminal of our whistlestop tour of the BA hotel scene. We hope the trip has been tolerable. We'd particularly like to thank you, the reader, without whom none of this would have been read. It's been wonderful to be here. It's certainly been a thrill. You've been such a lovely audience. We'd like to take you Home
with us, we'd like to take you Home...
But before that doesn't happen there are a few loose ends to knot. First, we'd like to offer a few predictions on the future of the BA hotel scene. We are yet to make a correct prediction in our entire lives, but this merely increases the odds that, one day, we will. (This rubbish is known to logicians and Las Vegas floor managers as the Gamblers' Fallacy.)
Secondly, we're going to throw in a few short reviews of hotels we missed out for one reason or another, usually incompetence. Several of these have been prompted by reader requests, so thanks for that.
Travel writer Matt Chesterton may know more about the Buenos Aires hotel scene than anyone else on the planet, our words not his. When he isn't hiding from his creditors he is out and about in BA. For the next two weeks he will be busting myths and spouting off about the BA hotel scene. For starters, he has told us that La Cabaña is not the best steakhouse in Argentina, and rather, a national embarrassment, the kind of place that in previous epochs of "our" history would have been firebombed--reserved for Steakhouse Suckers, his words, not ours. This is exactly the kind of unadulterated sentiment you can expect to find here in the next couple of weeks--plus he is hilarious. If you wish to use this time to ask him a burning question you have about BA hotels, shoot it our way, and we will hand deliver it to him. Enjoy.
Ostinatto Hostel, Buenos Aires
Euphemisms rule. If an enemy accidentally drops high explosives on your home and wastes you, you're 'collateral damage'. If a buddy accidentally drops high explosives on your Humvee, and wastes you, you're a victim of 'friendly fire'.
We could drone on in this sub-Jerry Seinfeld vein for ever, but what's it got to do with accommodation in BA? Not a lot, except perhaps this. There doesn't seem to anything called simply a 'youth hostel' anymore. It may look like a youth hostel, it may sound like a youth hostel, it will sure as hell smell like a youth hostel. But the owners won't market it as such - not when they can call it a 'chill house', a 'design budget lodging' or - and this is our favorite because it sounds like a cross between a frathouse and a train station - 'party central'.
This isn't a sneer, it's a cheer. The youth hostels we remember from our distant youth had one thing in common: they all blew. The ones we remember from travels round our British homeland blew the hardest of all. They were owned by the kind of hippies other hippies avoided. The 'menu' was lentil stew for supper, tea with powdered milk for breakfast, lentil rissoles for lunch. The architecture could be described thus: one thing over your head to keep the rain from hitting you, four things surrounding you to keep the wind from hitting you. If you were really lucky there would be a ping-pong table in some freezing outhouse, with a sagging net and bats with the rubber peeling off. For the honor of flopping in such a hellhole you had to do 'chores'. At least in the army they give you decent food and some expensive lethal gizmos to mess around with.
So why do we feel a twinge of nostalgia for such places? Same reason people miss their brutal boarding schools. The more dismal the environment, the crueler the authorities, the more esprit de corps in the ranks. We were all in this shit together. The worse the conditions, the more fun it was to whine about them. Friendships forged in these old-school hostels would last for days, sometimes even weeks.
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by juliana
