The Ghani Palace Hotel

The Ghani Palace Hotel crouches on the shores of the Arabian gulf, her faded glory gently decaying into the desert. Once she may have been considered beautify, but her charm had gone grey, and the process had not been graceful. In her later years, she received few guests into the warrens of her hallways, and when she did, it seemed to come as a great surprise. As her splendor waned, she became more of an architectural bookmark for beach front property rather than a page of text for some form of holiday nostalgia. Foot steps in her halls and many stairwells raised dust and sent the staff into a panic.

The feet of the Ghani Palace herself were like a pair of Roman sandals, harkening back to a mythological past, strips of balconies strapped wide spaces together. Small shops and offices made up the lower layer of mud this faded lotus stood in. Grimy little stores sold philosophical signs like, " If you drink, you die. If you don't drink, you die." There was a video store that rented Hollywood and Bollywood films with all the sex and violence left in, unlike the cinema versions that edited those parts out, resulting in a certain amount of plot ambiguity (if any of the film was left after the excision). There were small offices with crowded desks and empty chairs.

There were few actual people in the Ghani Palace Hotel. Guests were a disturbance that confused the staff. When ten guests suddenly arrived one day, it caused a shock that ran through the hotel and made her sigh and shift uneasily. Her elevator, already old and tired, groaned so audibly that any guest foolish enough to use it quickly learned the error of her ways and retired to the stairs, although this move disturbed other furry and feathered denizens of the hotel's upper and lower reaches. The stairs trailed through the Palace in intestinal twists and shifts. No one flight completely reached from top to bottom which resulted in elevator-leary guests wandering up and down random hallways searching for the next set of stairs. Pentacles appeared in the faux marbling of the walls. At the bottom of one set of stairs, many chairs clustered around the door ready to break free and run wild.

But the greatest shock to the frayed nerves of the venerable Ghani Palace Hotel was the invasion of the guest rooms by actual guests. Towels that had lain dormant to peacefully house sophisticated mold cultures were disturbed. Windows hosting sediment were shaken. Floors that supported a complex strata of desert dust and indigenous dust bunnies were trodden upon. The Ghani Palace shuddered.

The crumbling, abandoned apartment buildings across the street laughed at the Ghani Palace's discomfort. They happily hosted their cats and pigeons who did not try to wash their non-existent windows, sweep their dirt floors, or wipe their broken counters with disinfectant. The Symphony Building, the glass and steel high-rise next door, did not even glance toward the Ghani Palace who she considered an eye sore compared to her up-to-date superiority.

But the bulking, embarrassingly ornamented presence of the Ghani Palace Hotel could not be ignored even as the paint flaked off the balconies and her house-keeping staff puzzled over guest requests for bath mats. Her lumpy profile dominated the skyline available to her, and her distinctive costume jewelry of balconies, arched, windows, dusty carpets and odd ornamental empty pots added to her disturbing charm. The Ghani Palace was not so much a hotel as an invitation to an alternate reality, another Kuwait within Kuwait.