Bourgeoisie.

For forty dollars you could have bought a ticket to tour seven historical homes owned by rich people this weekend. I volunteered for this project because our team volunteered for it, and then was told that the high cost meant it wouldn't count as ISP, but by then we were all stuck with it.

Rich people can be awfully rude. It's not that their gaze passes over you, comes to you and stops, recognizing you as a person, only to move on. It's more like they've perfected the art of not even registering the presence of those in a lower tax bracket than them. Their eyes pass from wallpaper to drapes as if you're a fixture in the room, a table set between the two.

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When you stand in the same room for three hours as hundreds of people sift in and out, patterns emerge. Someone says "This room'd keep you awake!" every ten minutes. I was fortunate enough to have a chair in my room that I took advantage of, sure to sit as dignified as possible. This was still not enough for some.

"I see," one said to me as he passed through the room, all the entitlement of an aristocrat. "Sitting." How much contempt can you possibly put into one word spoken to a stranger doing nothing wrong?

And another, skipping hellos: "And what information do you have for me about this room?"
"I'm afraid they didn't tell me much more beyond that it's the guest bedroom for the owner's granddaughters."
"Ah. They already mentioned this. Not very informative; perhaps you'll be fired." There was not a hint of amusement in her voice, and I wore a shit-eating grin all throughout.

People smile if you smile, and continue about their business. Occasionally someone will say hello; once an hour someone will talk to you, as a human might to another human.

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The walls are a mustard-orange background with magenta toile print, and three triangular scenes repeat all across the wall in thin rosy lines: Tigers stalking through a jungle, people riding elephants, people chasing ostriches. The bedframes match the Indian motif of the wallpaper: headboards upholstered with magenta curves like the dome of the Taj Mahal. Many pillows all embroidered. I hear a lady in the other room say the floors are pickled wood, but it just looks like painted wood to me. The wallpaper continues into the bathroom, and the shower curtain and drapes and the trim of the beds have the same print on them.

The room on the other side of the hall is a living room with beautiful bookshelves. The sea-green walls are shiny, smooth and laquered. There's a sofa and two high-backed chairs surrounding a coffee table, a Persian rug beneath them all leading out to the back deck where a flutist is playing.

A tiny bathroom-- they insist on calling it a "powder room"-- is at the end of the hall, formerly a broom closet. A sharkskin-covered door opens to a dark room, black and red and gold wallpaper in some Asian scene I can't recall. The ceiling makes me think of Escher, since it's cut to accomodate the bottom of the stairs just above.

Each room is unbelievably tall, easily fifteen feet. The doors stop but the walls keeps going. Transom windows perch atop each doorframe, double doors made of tall thin slats of wood built like a drawing of a raft. Random paintings hang upon every wall, no unified style at all. Textured modern art hangs beside realistic oil portraiture, calligraphy and abstract watercolors the next room over. Every room is lavishly decorated and not at all tied to the next, chaotic jumble of pattern and texture and color permeating the whole of the house.

Old rich people get old, but their houses sure are something to aspire to.