The hotel in Turku
My wife and I spent four nights in the Sokos Hotel Hamburger Boras in Turku, so we got a pretty good sense of the place. Generally, I thought the hotel was quite good, though there were a couple odd or slightly lame things about it.
via flickr
[To the tune of Thomas Dolby, "Budapest By Blimp," from the album "The Best Of Thomas Dolby - Retrospectacle".]
via flickr
The location is excellent. Turku isn't very big, so there probably aren't many bad locations, but the hotel is right on the market square, which means you're very close to lots of buses (good if you want to go visit Moomin troll land, the Castle, or other sights), a couple blocks from the river, and within an easy walk of the Cathedral. The riverfront has been improving in the last few years, and there's a good-sized section of it that's very pleasant for walking.
via flickr
The breakfast was good. It's served in the old part of the hotel, which is a great Art Nouveau building finished around 1905, and thankfully hasn't been stripped of its decorative elements. Forget about the scrambled eggs-- they're powdered, and cooked to the consistency of egg-flavored Jello-- but most everything else is okay, and the coffee is excellent. There's also a Japanese breakfast, if you're into rice and fish for breakfast.
via flickr
The room was fine. The shower was a bit complex, as there are two separate controls for turning the water on and off, and controlling the temperature, and each of these has fail-safes to prevent the water accidentally getting too hot or too plentiful, but they're not tough to figure out. The queen-size bed is two double beds, pushed together-- but made up separately. So it's not very "together."
The one lame thing about it was that the wifi wasn't very good at all. They should either boost the signal, or also offer ethernet connections (which, if you're uploading fifty pictures to Flickr, is a godsend). And there was only one chair, and it wasn't very comfortable-- designed for someone much taller, my wife thought.
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