She tries to keep the children clean with mini-baths using bottled water.
(During my second stay a few weeks later, mini Neutrogena bath products had appeared).
If you're just looking to catnap, there's a daybed and flat-screen TV in the bathroom yes, that's right along with a round, hydro-massage mini pool, Jo Malone bath oils and Yves Delorme terry bathrobes.
For all the luxury – the whirlpool bath, the mini cocktail shaker in each room, the five-course breakfast – you still feel you're staying in a family home.
The bed has memory foam; the armoire holds a discreet flat-screen TV-DVD and a minibar, the bath a mini-sauna and/or whirlpool jets.
Awesome moments of ignorance-insight strike (often, curiously, in the bath) like mini-flashes of lightning, catapulting me out of a habitual mode of mind that fixates on the tiny speck of planet where, for a few brief years, I seem to have been planted.
Budget: Residencial Pão de Açúcar, 262 Rua Almada, (351-22) 200-2425, fax (351-22) 205-0239, in the heart of the city, is like a boardinghouse with frills: 50 large, comfortable rooms with private bath, satellite TV, mini-bar and room service.
Each of the bungalows could qualify as a mini-resort unto itself, with a media room, plunge pool, indoor-outdoor bath, giant flat-screen TVs, mini-bars stocked with beverages of the guest's choosing and a private yard that backs up to that amazingly blue lagoon.
