Our hotel in Kings Cross is entered from Victoria Street. You walk into a strange, empty, dim little downstairs lobby, carpeted in dark gray with broad purple stripes. It is furnished with white backless rectangular couches that look like studded marshmallow bars and a few shiny metallic studs growing out of the rug and intended as end tables. Add to this a run-around cushioned bench against the wall (which I imagined as the gathering place of bald, silent 23rd century Australians in robes meeting for some grave societal ritual we ancients could not possibly understand) and it’s like being on the set of a Kubrick film. An elevator carries you up to the main lobby on the second floor, less garishly colored, but with more marshmallow bars, and a front desk where young, attractive Australians check you in, give you room cards, and tell you not to go out on Darlinghurst Road after 10:00 pm.

The room cards are required not only to open our room doors, but to operate the elevator. Merely stepping in and pressing #3 won’t get us to the third floor. You have to dip your card in a slot inside the elevator, and then it will carry you up. Except that one of the elevators has evolved to the point where it can make decisions for itself, and sometimes it won’t accept the card until you do it three or four times.

Our room, once we get to it, continues the Kubrick theme with very nice, clean little white cube of a space, with a double bed and a view of the Sydney skyline marred only by the hideous Westfield tower, (Dear God. They’re everywhere) which looks as though someone gilded a bucket of fast food chicken and hoisted it up a spike.