It’s just after dark in Vancouver’s downtown financial district, on a chilly autumn evening, and I’m gazing up at the twisting, triangular, neo-futurist Trump International Hotel & Tower, rising 63 stories and 616 feet into the air. If you’re impressed by tall things, the Trump tower is pretty tall. But then I glance across West Georgia Street, at the Living Shangri-La tower, rising 62 stories but standing 659 feet tall. Which means that the Living Shangri-La is the tallest building here. For someone like Donald Trump who is obsessed with superlatives, it must be tough to have your name emblazoned on the second-tallest building in Vancouver.

From where I stand, the Trump International Hotel & Tower is not particularly welcoming. It’s 7:30 p.m., but I see very few lights on the higher floors, and I wonder who lives in the darkened condominiums in the upper parts of the tower. Below the condos, the hotel occupies the first 15 floors. All over the outside of the property, there are large white bloblike sculptures, as if a giant sneezed.

I’m paying nearly $300 per night to stay in one of the 147 five-star hotel rooms in the tower. When I arrived to check in, I gawked at the two Lamborghini Diablos parked in front of the hotel entrance. After I got to my room, I tried on the robe embroidered with “TRUMP,” along with the “TRUMP”-branded shower cap, in my marble-tiled bathroom. At the Trump Champagne Lounge, I ate a “delectable playful bite” — a trio of not-all-that-delectable toothpicked sliders — and ended up only ordering a cheap by-the-glass sparkling wine, since bottles on the Trump Champagne Lounge’s list range from $150 to $1,350. Throughout the lounge, which is interspersed with pillars that look like huge, gold-plated Jenga stacks, everyone else seemed to be speaking Chinese.

Earlier, I had a swim in the strange indoor pool that, late at night, transforms into a Vegas-style nightclub called Drai’s; I draped a towel on an upholstered lounge banquette. Later, I was given very professional, very invigorating massage treatment at The Spa by Ivanka Trump™ (which “personifies her lifestyle, embarking on every endeavor with energy and passion, but always taking the time to pause, heal and recharge”). At the spa, a woman with an Eastern European accent asked me about my “intention” for today’s treatment. “Calm, restore or energize?” she asked.

“Energize?” I answered.

The notion of my “intention” had, frankly, been nagging at me. Not just at The Spa by Ivanka Trump™, but existentially. Over the past six weeks, I’d been traveling to Trump vacation properties around the world. I’d been to the Trump golf resort near Aberdeen, Scotland, to Trump Winery in Virginia, to the Trump hotel and tower in Panama City, and now here in Vancouver. Before that tour, over the summer, I’d visited the former Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

A staircase at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver, B.C. (Ben Nelms/Bloomberg)

I wasn’t traveling as an investigative reporter or a salacious Michael Wolff type. As a food and travel writer, my role as a contributor to The Washington Post has always been a minor, lighter-weight one. I’m someone who roves around and writes about craft beverages or artisan cheese or cigar culture or Spanish tapas or Scandinavian culinary movements — someone you’d turn to for a cocktail recipe or a bar recommendation, not political commentary. But at this point, Trump has been written about in every other genre of journalism: political, entertainment, financial, fashion, sports. Why not look at Trump, promiser of luxury experiences, through the eyes of a travel writer? My plan was to sleep in the various Trump hotels, experience the Trump amenities, wear the Trump robe and shower cap, eat in the Trump restaurants, drink in the Trump bars — no differently than when I anonymously visit and review any other establishment in the course of a travel or food article. Given the state of things, this might have been naive, but that’s what I ended up doing.

On my second night in Vancouver — my final stop on this journey — I’m planning to eat at Mott 32, the “luxury Chinese” spot on the ground floor of the Trump hotel. Just as I’m about to walk back inside for dinner, a black SUV drives past with its passenger window lowered. A young woman leans out, waving two middle fingers and screaming at the top of her lungs: “F--- you, Trump! F--- you! F--- you! F--- you, Trump!” It’s like the primal shriek of a banshee. I am one of only two people standing outside the entrance, so it feels like much of her hate is being directed at me. Since I am a paying customer here, perhaps that’s her point.

After the SUV cruises on, the street is quiet again. A Trump employee standing nearby shrugs and opens the lobby door for me. His body language is similar to that of the bartender I chatted with at the Trump Champagne Lounge earlier, who grimaced when the name “Donald Trump” was uttered. “The property is actually owned by TA Global,” the bartender said, making clear that the Trump brand is licensed. “It’s like a franchise.”

The $360 million hotel and condominium development was, in fact, funded by 38-year-old Joo Kim Tiah, whose family presides over the Malaysia-based financial and real estate empire TA Global. It’s not clear exactly how much Tiah pays in fees to the Trump Organization. When the tower opened in February 2017, it was the first new Trump property since he assumed the presidency and announced he was stepping aside from day-to-day control to let his sons run the Trump Organization. Eric, Donald Jr. and even Tiffany joined Tiah at the ribbon cutting, along with a group of protesters singing “O Canada” and carrying signs reading “Dump Trump” outside amid the white blobs.

Who was not in attendance was the mayor of Vancouver and other prominent officials. “Trump’s name and brand have no more place on Vancouver’s skyline than his ignorant ideas have in the modern world,” Mayor Gregor Robertson wrote in a letter to Tiah. A city council member, Kerry Jang, called the tower “a beacon of intolerance” and said it had “bad karma.”

Protesters outside the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver. (Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)

At Mott 32, the dining room is completely full and I’m seated at the bar. Mott 32 is the North American outpost of a famous Hong Kong restaurant, which has another location forthcoming in Bangkok. A critic for the Globe and Mail newspaper called it “the most noteworthy restaurant to open in Vancouver for many years.” The Filipino bartender explains that the majority of the clientele in Mott 32 speaks Mandarin and is wealthy. Scanning the full dining room, I can believe it. At the table in front of me, a waiter carves the $95 Peking duck for a Chinese family, with several children playing on their iPads. That Peking duck is not even close to the most expensive dish on the menu: A whole suckling pig costs $495; braised whole dried fish maw, in abalone sauce, is listed at $580. (Canadian dollars, but still.) I order a few of the more affordable small dishes from the “Evening Dim Sum” menu: an unexceptional duck spring roll, some hot-and-sour Shanghai-style soup dumplings, which are surprisingly tasty, and a black truffle siu mai with Iberico pork and a soft quail egg, served at room temperature, that is just too ambitious to be anything but disappointing. The bartender makes a little joke when he serves the siu mai: “Be careful about the egg inside. It’s a soft yolk and you don’t want it all over your shirt.”

Prices of note: Rooms about $300 to $1,500 per night. In the hotel restaurant, Mott 32, braised whole dried fish maw, in abalone sauce, is about $450. Trump’s imprint: In the Gentlemen’s Studio of The Spa by Ivanka Trump, you can get a 60-minute “executive facial” for $128 or a sports massage for $143. Insider’s tip: Nearly a third of Vancouver’s population is Chinese, so skip the upscale Mott 32 and seek out the city’s buzzing Chinatown.

I tell the bartender about the screaming protester who’d driven by outside, and he looks pained. “Ah, politics,” he says with a sigh. “I have friends that tell me, ‘Well, we can’t visit you now because you work at that place.’ ” He adds, somberly: “This property is owned by TA Global, not Trump.”

Back in my room, still hungry, I open a container of honey roasted peanuts ($8) and a Mexican beer ($11) from the minibar, flip on CNN and lie on the bed watching reports on the first indictments in the Mueller investigation. As a jaded travel writer, someone who has stayed in many soulless hotels and eaten in many overpriced restaurants in many disappointing places, I’m completely at ease with a certain exquisite idleness and ennui. But there’s something profoundly unsettling about the sort of boredom that I’ve been feeling in the Trump properties over the past many weeks.

To be clear, none of my experience has been terrible, and some of it has been pleasant. Mostly, though, I’ve been overwhelmed by a relentless, insistent, in-your-face mediocrity: the scolding “Notice to Guests” in my room at the Trump MacLeod House & Lodge in Scotland, warning that I will be charged punitively if I take the lint brush, shoehorn, coasters or other Trump-branded amenities; the strange card displayed in my room at the Albemarle Estate in Charlottesville explaining that “Countryside stink bugs” will “occasionally be found” inside and the jar of stale chocolate chip cookies I’m told was the only food available later at night; the eerie near-emptiness and peeling paint of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Panama, touted as the tallest building in Central America. And it’s this mediocrity that’s the most disquieting.

I think about the woman earlier this evening who screamed from her SUV, yelling at those of us who happened to be standing in front of the silent, cold, glistening tower. It was a little over-the-top. I suspect that this type of white-hot outrage and hysteria will eventually cool. I also suspect that the era of Trump will pass soon enough. When that happens, what terrifies me is not that Trump’s presidency will have ended up as an exploding, burning disaster — but rather that it will have become something dangerously lukewarm, seeping into our identity. Kind of like that black truffle siu mai with the quail egg inside, served room temperature, with the soft yolk that threatens to ooze down the shirt of the person who ordered it.