I have stayed in a lot of hotels over the past decade. My work on Smithsonian Journeys tours takes me through a string of European cities for weeks at a time. Also, my role speaking as “Professor Carol” puts me in a multiplicity of US hotels. The fact is, as someone who never left her backyard growing up, I have definitely made up for lost time.

And yes, it is glorious. Unquestionably it has enhanced this period of my life in ways I could never have envisioned. I realize how inordinately privileged I am to have these opportunities.

Here’s the thing, though. There are moments of challenge. I’m not referring to bumps all travelers face like lost suitcases, hugely delayed flights, or tired feet. I’m referring to the need to puzzle small issues such as one I’ll dwell on here namely, how does one work the bathroom fixtures in today’s ultra-modern hotels?

Apparently sometime around 1990, committees of design-dazzled architects across the world decided that hotels needed to look more like banks or chemistry labs. So, bit by bit, the grand hotels of the past have been remodeled in accord with what can be labeled the “Post-Post-Modern Style.”

That has meant, among other things, encasing hotel bathrooms in grey or black marble, with smoky colored, poorly lit, cleverly inserted mirrors. Nice round sinks are replaced by angular vessels standing high above the counters or set in casings cut at acute angles. Discrete metal protrusions serve as towel racks, if you can identify them as such. Should there be a real towel rack, it tends to be hidden low, so as not to spoil “the look.”

Then, there’s the matter of the bathtubs. Out comes the traditional tub, replaced by marble-walled, glass-shielded walk-in showers (so where are you supposed to bathe toddlers?). To take the cake, these showers and sinks sport the weirdest collection of faucet and spraying hardware you can imagine. If only I had had the foresight to photograph the bathroom hardware I’ve seen in the past ten years! I would create a game entitled: “Identify the Object and Explain How It Works.”

I usually figure things out, though, so don’t worry. Still, I’m amused every time I overhear a conversation at breakfast the morning after we check into a hotel regarding how long it took folks to turn on the shower. I’m doubly vindicated when I see that a hotel has had to install a plaque next to a certain fixture saying “Press here,” or “Push button in and turn.”

So let’s go back to my present hotel in Vienna. Ah, Vienna—arguably the most opulent city in the Western Hemisphere. Vienna is repeatedly ranked in important studies as “the most livable city in the world” and I believe it. Naturally, our hotel on the glorious Ringstrasse is newly remodeled which means it screams of black and grey marble with creamy contrasts. The lobby is filled with stiff leather furniture and glass, marble, or burnished metal tables. Good luck finding anything soft!

But, of course, soft is out. Away too with the brocades, tapestries, velvet, ruffles, and trims of the “grand hotel.” These are relics of a by-gone age. Rarely do you find anything you can sink into for dreaming away the hours. After all, who in today’s bustling world sits and dreams?

But back to my hotel . . . more specifically the bathroom. I requested a room that still had a tub and, to my surprise, got one. But what a tub! This is not like my tub at home. This is a massive, blindingly white trapezoid that resembles the inverted top of a butter dish. Need I mention that it’s got the mark of Villeroy & Boch?

All elegance aside, think about sitting in an inverted top of a butter dish. For protecting a stick of butter, that’s fine. But for a person wanting to relax in a bubble bath and read a good novel? Forget it.

Still, the tub brought forth marvelously hot, crystal-clear Viennese water that comes straight from the Alps. Believe me, long days of touring leave one ready to soak! So I was grateful for this elegant, if uncomfortable, vessel. And using my acquired experience with modern fixtures, I figured out how to turn on the water.

So far, so good. Except I could not figure out how to let the water out. There was absolutely no identifiable mechanism I could use to pull, push, slide, or wiggle the shiny silver plate that was already covering up the drain hole when I turned the water on. I tried a bunch of clever moves. I even looked around for a plaque that might say: “To open drain, slide lever hidden on the opposite wall.” Auf deutsch, of course.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy interesting designs, particularly radical changes of style that mark historical eras. I have spent my life studying history, and that inevitably means tracking the history of changing styles in every aspect of daily life, including faucets! But once the average person cannot determine how to make something mundane work, design has gone too far.

So there I stood, in jammies and robed in the cushy hotel robe, struggling with this tub. I called the desk and asked in my best German how to open the drain. They had no ready answer other than: “An engineer will come to your room to help.” Auf englisch, of course.

And he did. Almost immediately (this is Vienna, after all). But he too wasn’t sure, so together we worked to slide the silver plate off the drain. Then we realized it would pop up if we continually squeezed a silver plate above the spout (I won’t describe what the spout looked like, but think of a porcelain waterfall.)

Having to stand around squeezing a silver plate until a bathtub empties doesn’t sound all that post-post modern to me. Or maybe that is the very definition of post-post modern!

I squeezed until the tub was drained and went to bed. A note left in the room testifies to the fact that maintenance attended to the problem, so now one has only to squeeze the silver plate firmly so that it locks in place and the drain plate will stay popped up. Problem solved. Still, when I return for this same tour next year, I fully expect to find a plaque with instructions on how to drain the tub.

The only problem remaining for me in Vienna today (one you surely would prefer to the challenges you face today) will be to eat an enormous schnitzel at tonight’s pre-concert dinner. Honestly, it is bigger than the plate. And then our group rushes off to a lovely evening of Mozart and Johann Strauss. Tomorrow we will arise even better versed in Viennese culture, and spend the day at the Heiligenkreuz Cistercian Abbey, followed by a tour through the Vienna Woods.

And the day after that, it will be time to travel to our last hotel in Prague—one that has not been remodeled. The lobby welcomes guests with plush velvety furniture, brocade drapes trimmed with tassels, and thick oriental carpets. There will be more soft furniture and recognizable fixtures in our rooms. Fully modern in its service, this hotel still expresses confidence in the classic standards of beauty. And yes, I smile, contemplating it.