The GCW Tour, Spain & Morocco: Counting Shouldn't Be This Hard

How hard is it to number the floors in a building? First floor, second floor -- keep counting til you run out of floors. Yeah, I wish.

First issue: when you walk in off the street are you on the building's "first floor" or its "zero floor"? 

Second issue: what about the "unlucky" floors? American buildings "skip" the thirteenth floor -- well, there's obviously a thirteenth if the building has that many floors, we just don't call it that -- while the Chinese skip the fourth or sixth or some other number they don't like, and I'm sure other cultures have similar phobias. 

Third issue: what do you do about the various mezzanines? Count them or no? 

Hell, we may as well just randomly number a building's floors for all the logic our current schemes utilize.

All of this is relevant as the niece and I were supposed to watch the bulls from a fifth floor balcony this morning. Yet when we got to the designated apartment, the guy had no idea who we were and no intention of letting us stay. 

Skipping to the punchline, when I finally got things sorted with the hotel the clerk tried to explain that while we told to ring the fifth floor apartment, because the ground floor is one, we really needed to ring the bell for the sixth floor (and no, the math doesn't make any sense at all). And as much as the clerk tried to explain the logic, and as much as I tried to explain that I wasn't going to count the floors but just press the little button with the specified number next to it, I'm not sure either one of us was able to make the other understand.

Eventually, we just agreed that I would ignore what was written on the paper, ignore how the floors are numbered, and just ring the bell for #6.

We'll see what happens tomorrow when, once again, I'll have to get up at 4:45 am.

I'm tired of getting up at 4:45 am...