Hotel Vice-Rei

The room and its furniture is clean and respectable, the bathroom is on the excellent side, there is a reception desk clerk, elevator, cleaners every day, fresh towels, TV, and so on. It works for me as essentially a business/tourist hotel to come back to after being out and about all day, and it meets the standards for that sort of thing on the dot. The best thing is the area, which has a faux-market in the casa do musica where it is cheering to eat in the evening. There is also a boutique mall in one of the upmarket buildings nearby with a cheap and nice starbucks! I got coffee at 85c the cup in a bookshop upstairs in another mall building. The area by the big roundabout up the street has more authentic places to eat and shop. I found a Spar supermarket by the casa do musica metro off there. An airport bus stop (601, 2E) is just opposite the hotel, and there's a metro station on another street off the big roundabout. One can walk straight down to the port, about a mile (you need to be in good shape to walk back up that hill).

It's a business-style or american motel-style (ex room size, which is more japanese than american!) hotel. I found it really dispiriting for such a clean place. The building is 60s rapid-build low-quality appartment block and rooms are square boxes, about 10ft by 10ft, with a good double bed and bedside table plus tiny work table, with a balcony. There must be a couple of hundred basically identical rooms. Perhaps that was a student residence before being turned into a hotel. I thought the balcony would be nice but it is dirty because it is dusty in the area and there is nothing to look at out there and it is too small to contemplate sitting out on for real. It helps make the room slightly less small, though! (if one can get the balcony door open - I had a lot of trouble). There is no character at all in the place, but one can stand it for a time. The sheets are clean (I had suspicions about the shiny blue coverlet and dumped that). There's no lounge that I saw but maybe the first floor (where breakfast happens, which I did not go to) has something. They wouldn't let me check in until 2pm although I arrived at 12.30, and there was nowhere I could see to sit and wait so I wandered the streets for an hour and a half before I could check in, having arrived by taxi! The clerk did eventually get me a room high up for quiet as I asked, but only after having said when I arrived that it was all reserved and nothing could be done. This place is on the upper town and it is very, very hard work to come back up the mile up the hill from the port on foot, as I did. It looks close on the map, but the hills don't show. I'd probably try for a hotel out of town if I had to do this again, and come in by metro.