Harmony

My hotel in Jerusalem is called the Harmony Hotel and is smack in the middle of the center of the New City restaurant and tourist district. It’s an inexpensive boutique style hotel, small and modishly appointed. A welcome relief from La Nuit Sorrento. This place is so new that they haven’t even finished the construction on the ground level of the place, which didn’t affect the hotel as the ground level was given over to some small shops and not the hotel at all.

I can recommend this hotel, and I was glad I sprang for fairly nice accommodations, as my days in Jerusalem would prove to be trying at times…

I enjoyed hanging out in the breakfast/dining/lobby area, which was one large room. I lingered almost everyday after breakfast, and came to the 5-7PM cocktail hour, though they were light on the actual cocktail experience. The Harmony concept of cocktail hour seems to be to plunk down a bottle of cheap vodka next to a bottle of cheap wine.

The public areas of the hotel are all outfitted with flat screen TVs that continuously play a 15 minute video loop of some kind of High Concept art. Typical scenes from the endlessly repeated loop: (1) two guys playing chess with life size chess pieces, where the pieces were made from differently colored (flavored?) ices. The ice lolly chess pieces melted in time-lapse videography as the game went on. The chess clock was a man inside a rotatable plexiglass hourglass-shaped box partially filled with ping-pong balls (2) a woman in high fashion clothing who climbs to the top of a canyon wall and silently screams into the abyss.

They may be trying a trying a bit too hard here at the Harmony Hotel.