My First and Last Visit to the Last Hotel

I think we heard that the recently opened Last Hotel had good food so we stopped in for a little dinner. 

The staff was kind of pissy, there might have been one other table occupied in the whole place, and despite the fact it was 8pm at a hotel they acted like they were already winding down and only had a limited bar menu available. Last Kitchen at the Last Hotel, on the last time I ever come here. It was poetic, really.

The staff being losers was unfortunate because for one thing, the building is beautiful. It was built in 1909 to be the International Shoe Company headquarters. Look at those columns!

One nice thing about eating in a hotel is that there were plenty of free newspapers laying around. Marijuana was just made legal in Illinois at the beginning of the year, so there's been a lot of hubub about it. Everyone is interested in what sort of tax revenue will be generated, and what effects the change in Illinois may have on us in Missouri. I'm not interested in partaking personally but I do think it's safe to say that the war on drugs has been an expensive and violent failure.

I can't seem to find this on the menu. I think it was an artichoke dip.

The caesar salad was legit. You don't often see it with anchovies around these parts.

We had a swell time in Eldon, Iowa, and I think it deserves to be revitalized.

I think this was like a deconstructed candy bar. I reconstructed it in my stomach.

White Water Rafting in Bali

One sad thing about fancy hotels is their breakfast usually isn't free. I live a hard life.

Today the mission was: white water rafting down the Ayung River in Ubud.

As we drove we saw a lot of these little flower piles in front of people's houses. Our driver put it pretty succinctly: "flowers in front of house three times a day keeps the evil away".

The rafting was fun. We saw some monkeys and some cool carvings in the rock while we bounced our way down the river. It was pretty chill compared to our previous white water experience. Rafting in Ecuador was much more about trying to not drown, with people flying over the side of boat over and over.

Lunch afterwards was part of the package. They had some good weird stuff for me to try.

Bubur Mutiara (pink pearl pudding)

Balinese traditional dessert

Indonesian traditional dessert. I was amused that they didn't even try to explain what this way. It's friggin' traditional. Eat it.

Lydia had some fun ideas on what to do next in this part of Bali, but I was beat from the rafting and the flights, so we went back. I still feel a little bit guilty that we missed some cool stuff because I ran out of gas. Oh well.

The hotel was still looking fly when we returned.

For dinner we hit up a nearby Balinese McDonald's that I was excited to try. The trick here is that they have some Hindu people around so there's no beef on the menu. But they also have some Muslim people around, so there's no pork! Needless to say there was chicken for days on this menu.

They had these fun little meal things with rice pictured sitting on top of leaves.

I went for the paket ayam serundeng spesial sambal terasi - spicy. Quite a wordy dish, that one.

I also had no choice to order a chicken sandwich that came with a black bun: the McSpicy Black Topokki.

There was a giant Halal sign on the door.

Some dessert may have happened as well. I'm a sucker for a good matcha green tea ice cream.

More Halal seals of approval.

We hit a local grocery store on the way home. I thought this little phone charging locker setup was a nice touch.

They had a ton of salak, which I just had my first nibble of in Cambodia.

There were a lot of kinds of date available. It was currently Ramadan so I think a lot of the snacks were for that.

There was a little offering assortment thing at the cash register.

I couldn't get enough of how cool the hotel was.