Hotel Novotel di Curitiba

This is a mid-range brand of the Accor hotel chain and theoretically offers a good level of comfort, albeit at European-level prices. I stayed five nights to experience Curitiba and its surroundings in detail, though five days of continuous rain and low temperatures were obviously not ideal for such a visit. The hotel did not provide or even rent umbrellas for guests, though advised me where I could by one if prepared to walk a couple of hundred meters under the deluge. I found the accommodation satisfactory in most respects, but there were a number of very minor things that were not quite as they might have been. My reasonably sized room was on the cold side, and the fan heater seemed to do little but blow cold air around the room until I managed to reset it by random pressing of buttons (no instructions were provided), which I did on several occasions and still don’t know how I succeeded. The shampoo/gel dispenser in the shower was empty, though I always bring my own soap anyway. The breakfast buffet was extensive, though nothing exceptional by Brazilian standards. On my first evening I dined in the hotel restaurant, finding that my free drink voucher was valid only for either of the two cheapest beers on the menu. Why even bother? At the hotel’s Peruvian themed restaurant I ordered a vegetarian ceviche as a starter, and a veggie chaufa as a main, but the waiter brought me a totally wrong (meat) dish, then seemed a bit put out that I rejected it – she was visibly reprimanded by the maitre d’. I ate elsewhere on the other nights of my stay but noticed on my return to the hotel one evening that diners were being loudly serenaded by a ?Peruvian style band that didn’t seem very conducive to a quiet working dinner, nor to a romantic occasion. My room had thick curtains drawn across the window, which hid the view of a dim and dreary inner courtyard. On the plus side, the wifi was fast and consistent, the bed very comfortable, the safe for valuables reassuring and the working desk functional. The central location was very convenient for seeing the main sights, and getting around the rather large city by uber was correspondingly inexpensive, making up for the steep room rate.