维也纳酒店 — Hotel in Shanghai

Sartre was looking for the notion of hell in “no exit” in the notion of a closed room in which the other people function as their contributors to hell. But I suppose Sartre was not a visitor of this hotel, so that he had to rely on metaphors he had available at the time. I must say, having visited this hotel, I came to the conclusion that this came pretty close to what I would imagine hell on earth to be.||||Even on a level high up in the building, the concept of sleep gives rise to enormous challenges, given that the noise from the major street in front of the hotel is unbearable. Windows are single glassed and hardly close, so that they can rather be seen as a conceptual boundary as they would keep anything (cold, sounds) out.||||Nobody in the hotel can speak even a little bit of English. In a hotel that tries to given an international impression and that is called "Vienna International Hotel", this is a bit funny. Also, cultural differences even seem to make non-verbal communication difficult. In all, I found the staff largely unhelpful.||||When I entered, the corridor was filled with piles of cloth, and huge fans were adding to the enormous noise levels. Maybe there has been a major flooding in the building? I will probably never find out.||||The priorities seem all wrong here. The entrance is bombastic and makes the impression as if to want to show off - inside, the priorities have not been set on the actual relevant things. It does not help - but this is of course not the fault of the hotel - that the internet has largely been blocked by...

A colleague I was visiting reserved this hotel for me. The room is very nice, clean, good size for Asia, great shower, Bed, with a wired internet connection as well as free wifi. ||Yes it is true the staff don't speak much English. However, using Google translate you are in good shape. there is a conversation mode in which you speak English, then they hear the translation and vice versa. If you download the file, you can also use the camera in Google translate to convert things like menus to English on the fly. This is very convenient. Get yourself a China SIM card so that you can have internet wherever you need to go.||||There is a nice western style bakery to the side of this as well as a nice Chinese restaurant on the opposite side. There is a daily asian breakfast, which is typically many cooked vegetables, rice, noodles, but you can get fried eggs and toast as well as an assortment of fruit. ||This is an China hotel chain, and there are several. The US based chains are much more expensive, and not necessarily any better. ||||If you haven't travelled in Asia before and need a great deal of handholding, this perhaps isn't the hotel for you, but if you are familiar with travel in Asia, this is...

For $200/night, you get a hard slab they call a bed, covered by dark-stained bedding, in an ancient hotel, so utterly filled with smoke, that I awoke choking with my throat swelling shut due to allergy to smoke and fled to the airport at 4 am, after only 6 hours in this creepy dump. Cigarette butts on the floor of the elevator, despite the ashtrays everywhere, not one English-speaking staff member, no actual internet access in spite of stating that Free wifi is available, due to govt. control. No cell phone use possible without Chinese SIM card, which you will be offered to buy the second you Exit at Pudong. At every turn, you will be offered cheap iPhones, Nokia phones and SIM cards, that are not compatible with foreign cell phones anyways. It hardly matters that the noise from the busy nearby major roadway is ever-present, as there are too many other factors worse here, than to be concerned with...