Ode to Hotel Florida

19th April 2011. We escape the land of frozen dreams and make our way to Montevideo, where belle époque houses warming up in the autumnal sun make us happy like puppies. We stay at Hotel Florida, halfway between Plaza Independencia and the port. It is a palace, dignified, bending under the weight of time. The magnificent lobby - grand staircase and trumpeting cherubs - cocoons a 1900s display cabinet filled with desirable consumables: small whiskey bottles, chocolates, biscuits, beer cans and cigarettes. The rooms have 6 metre high ceilings with intricate moulds, painted at some later point the colour of clotted blood to shrink them to human size, 4 metre tall wooden doors and windows, a mix of crumbling 1930s monolithic armoires, sturdy wooden tables and plastic Chinese fans. It makes us feel cool, like unpunished perverted satyrs, simply for being here. We try to eulogize its phantasmatic largesse in a photographic ode.