floating hotel, tenerife part the third.
The reason for the above title was that the predominant building material used on the island (which is volcanic, have you been paying attention? there'll be questions later) is pumice, and it seemed a perfectly reasonable theory that in the event of rising tides the entire building would rise up and float away.
I'll swiftly bring my saga of dodgy electrics to a conclusion and then get on to more interesting things. It wasn't until the end of my first evening rigging, (started at 3.00 pm, ground to a halt at 4.00 am, back in at 8.00 am through to 5.00 am the next day since you asked), that I discovered that we weren't in fact plumbed into the hotel's electrics at all. When we walked in to the building on our arrival, we had noticed a large generator, perched on the main road, by a bus stop, some considerable distance from the Hotel. We thought nothing of it, there was a lot of construction work going on (spanish hotel, building work...are they ever finished or do they grow like topsy?), someone jokingly said; 'I hope that's not for us' and it passed from our thoughts. So, when I told them to power down at the end of the evening, and my rudimentary spanish roughly translated the reply as 'I'll go and turn the generator off then' I began to smell a rat.
Two points here, it is illegal in the UK to use dual voltage installations (ie; ones where you are using two different sources of power), this is because there could potentially be a voltage difference between the generator power and the house power that is greater than the normal voltage differences, and is thus more dangerous. Secondly, if you are spending £300.000+ on a party the last thing you want to do is rely on a single generator, there should always be two (one as a back up).
The next day, of course, there was a problem, we were, as already mentioned, back in at 8.00. Nobody had thought to tell us who had the key to the genny, or indeed where it was. We dismissed the previously seen one, on the grounds that it was outside the hotel and a long way away. When, an hour and a half later, we got the keyholder to come in, he took me to check it out. Guess what, the lone genny up on the hillside was ours, and it was a ten minute walk from the venue (which is terrific if there's a problem). The solution offered by the venue was to have a golf buggy waiting outside for me throughout the evening, a promise they did not keep, by the way, as I checked.
Oh well, we got away with it, lessons were learned (by us at least), and no serious accidents occurred. I walked into a swimming pool whilst on the phone, and we had a couple of comic accidents with spanish ladders deciding to fold up with people on them, and we all had very sore feet and calves by the end. Let's hope they choose somewhere flatter next year.
Incidentally, the above images are of one of the flocks of parrots that zoom about shrieking and a strelitzia alba in bloom. There are also many pestiferous collared doves squeaking about the place. I came back to Ealing to be greeted with flocks of parakeets, collared doves and a flat full of bananas and strelitzia, isn't nature wonderful. It's a lot colder though.
posted by Lampy @ 2/08/2006 11:37:00 am
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