The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
May 8 - Why a Waterfall Hotel?
This is the Lijiang Waterfall Hotel in Guilin, our last stop on our three-week China odyssey. The name is intriguing ... but why do they call it a waterfall hotel?
This is called the Lijiang Waterfall Hotel because at 8:30 every evening, the back of the hotel becomes a raging waterfall! For ten minutes, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water pour down the back of the building to a musical soundtrack ... and a large, appreciative crowd gathered in the plaza behind the property.
It is a bit like a rock festival back there, with news on the jumbotron screen (the Olympic torch arriving at the top of Mt. Everest was the big story of the day), kids running around and everyone with a camera taking photos of the happening. The show itself is rather hypnotic and Margene and I were both snapping picture after picture until it suddenly struck us that they were all really the same. So all you get is two of the water itself -- the beginning of the show and somewhere in the middle.
It all seems rather extravagent until you realize that this is mostly all they have to do to market the property. It is certainly the reason we chose to stay here instead of at another hotel. If nothing else, the Chinese think big. The great wall is a big idea. The Three Gorges Dam Project is a big idea. Turning a hotel into a waterfall is a big idea. So the question is, are you thinking big ... or small? Change your vision and you will change your life.
The twin pagodas in the lake outside the hotel are intriguing by day ... and romantic at night. The Chinese do a magnificent job of lighting buildings like this, using hundreds of tiny individual spotlights rather than the larger floodlights we typically see in the US. Does that take more work? Of course ... but they are doing the work!
© 2008 Restaurant Doctor
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