Post-NMUN rap-ups

Well, it's been a few days since I've gotten back and I guess I can afford to be somewhat philosophical about NMUN if I wanted to, but eh, why bother. I'm going to be blunt here...as noted in the last entry, the NMUN conference and the Hilton New York hotel both sucked, but I sure did love New York. Would I live there? Not likely, but would I go back again? In a heartbeat.

We'll start where one should always start...at the beginning. Six people had left for New York on Friday and nine of us were going on the Saturday. Five others had made their own arrangements. So on the Friday night, I got an email that the Friday party had some major problems checking into the hotel and that the hotel wanted to pre-authorize $1000 on each credit card of those people. Well, this didn't go down very well, and I started to get that ominous feeling about the trip. When we arrived at the hotel on the Saturday, Jeevan and Donovan had to argue with the Front Desk guy for more than half an hour to get things somewhat settled and we paid our rooms. Well, the hotel split us up so that 3 groups were on the 27th floor, my group was on the 23rd floor and another group was on the 9th floor. You are thinking to yourself, 'Well, that doesn't sound like a big deal', and normally I'd agree, BUT...

The hotel is 44 storeys tall and has 4 elevator banks that take you to groups of floors. All elevators went from the main floor to 5, but then one bank went 1-15, one bank 15-24, one bank 24-34, and the last bank 34-44. So for us to all meet, it took anywhere from 1 elevator ride to 3. Slight inconvenience? Maybe if it was a regular week at the Hilton, but this was NMUN week, and about 1500 or more students are running wild along with us.

We got into our rooms and found that our queen beds were doubles, our tv was sketchy, the wireless internet was priced at USD$10 per day, and the hotel, in it's infinite wisdom, had put Carol on their list as the primary cardholder in our room, so we couldn't connect to the internet without charging it to her...even after we said we wanted to change it to someone else. Our blankets were thin and useless, there weren't nearly enough pillows, etc. I mean, for a hotel brand that is supposed to come with some prestige, I am shocked that the hotel was so ghetto. The staff was mostly rude to us, with the exceptions of the housekeepers and the Concierge. If I was a Hilton, I'd be embarassed to have that property bear my name.

On to the Conference itself. I can't separate the conference from the hotel at this point and I'll explain why. The schedules for most committees were the same times, meaning about 1500 delegates were scrambling to the elevators to get to or from the meeting rooms. Remember what I said about the 4 elevator banks? 1500 divided by 12 elevators, plus regular guest traffic. Do the math. a 45 minute wait to get upstairs to my room is riduculous. But there's more...I walked into my committee room on Tuesday night and saw rows of chairs. Considering we're supposed to be writing and negotiating and so on, in a committee of 460 people, you'd think there would be *tables*. But no. In fact, most of the big committees were without tables. No tables also meant no organization. It was 'pick a seat, any seat!', and that's bad when you are trying to find people whom you are supposed to negotiate and caucus with.

The fact that there were award-hounds also put me off. It seemed to me that everyone was in more of a hurry to be noticed so that their schools could win awards, and that caused a lot of pushiness and out of character wheeling and dealing. I thought the goal of Model United Nations was completely lost...few were actually interested in learning more about policy, decision-making, and international relations. It actually made me sad, and I wished I had gone to CANIMUN instead.

Conference services charged us for photocopies, there were seriously retarded rules for using the computers, there was a $10 charge for replacing lost placards, and so on.

My attention span is waning right now, so I'm going to cut this short and discuss the non-committee stuff next time.