Room Service

“There was a tear in the shower curtain, a picture was hanging crooked in a cheap frame, the baseboard and trim didn’t meet the wall or corners, and the electrical sockets were installed crookedly. Service was fine, and everything seemed clean enough.” So said a recent online review of the Seattle Hilton. All in all, it sounded like the reviewer had a pretty miserable experience–he rated the room a 4 out of 10.

Reading this review brought to mind several of my lodging experiences in other countries:

Chiang Rai: While living in Thailand years ago I took a trip to Chaing Rai, which was then a dusty little town in the far north of the country. I asked a local to recommend a hotel; he led me to what he said was “the best hotel in Chaing Rai.” It was a small, modest building with peeling paint. I asked the owner to see a room. He took me to what he proudly called “our very finest room.” With a flourish, he flung open the door. “See!”, he said. What I saw was an enormous rat scurrying up the far wall. It disappeared into the rafters of the open ceiling. Did I take the room? Of course—this was the finest room in the best hotel in Chaing Rai.

A tiny town in western Nepal: I flew out of Kathmandu on a small plane that landed on a dirt road two-thirds of the way to Pokhara. The bus to Pokhara didn’t leave until the next morning, so I looked for lodging. That was easy since there was only one hotel. It had about three rooms. The one I was assigned had just a single piece of furniture: a narrow, unmade bed with no pillow. There were no windows and no plumbing. The only electricity was a dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. When I straightened out the tea-colored sheet that had once been white, I saw that it was covered with numerous dots of blood. This was my first introduction to bed bugs.

The Himalayan foothills above Pokhara: I trekked up from Pokhara through steep terraced fields (see the photograph I took that’s associated with this blog). Soon I was in the foothills, with the jagged white Himalayas towering far above me. Late in the day I started looking for food. I came to a rickety building by the side of the path, where a sign said that they served dinner. The menu was simple: the sole offering was a large bowl of dal bhat—lentils over rice—for about 50 cents. A nice touch was that dinner came with a free bed for the night. So rather than bed and breakfast, with breakfast included, it was dinner and bed, with the bed included. My particular bed was a creaky wooden frame attached to an outside wall on the side of the building. The frame was topped with a thin lumpy pallet, with straw and dirt poking out through rips in the worn fabric. I think the Hilton reviewer would have liked this place since there was no torn shower curtain, crookedly hanging pictures, misaligned baseboards, or off-center electric sockets.

A small village in India, between Lucknow and New Delhi: My room was essentially a stall in a row of stalls. The door was a cloth curtain, and the floor was packed dirt. The walls were made of rough boards which went from the floors to a height of about six feet. At that point coarse black netting was attached to the boards and extended up to the bamboo ceiling. There was of course no air conditioning, but it stayed fairly cool since a breeze blew through the spaces between the boards and across the netting. Not surprisingly, the night was pretty noisy. But I didn’t expect to be irreversibly awakened at 5:00 a.m. That’s when my next-stall neighbor arose for what was apparently an extended upper airway cleansing ritual. This consisted of half an hour’s worth of very vigorous snorts, hacks, nose blows, throat clearings, and spitting. I hoped that he had some sort of spittoon to sequester the output.

Pader, Uganda: As part of a volunteer medical team, I had just arrived in Pader, in Northern Uganda, to provide care for the large refugee camps in the area. Our local contact was helping me settle in a room in what was optimistically called The Pader Hotel. I put down my rucksack and sat on the bed. He laughed and pointed to a one-foot hole in the ceiling. “Ha!”, he said, “don’t you see that you need to move your bed?” “Why is that?” I asked naively. “Because of the scorpions.” He said that scorpions liked to live in the walls and ceilings of buildings in this part of Uganda, and at night they often drop down from the ceiling, especially if they sense there might be something interesting directly below. I moved the bed tight against the opposite wall. The next morning I carefully checked everything out. Fortunately, I found no scorpions. But there were three rubbery little frogs in my rucksack, and two in my left boot.

Another review of the same Hilton was mixed: “Love this place and location. Beds were soft and comfortable. Room was clean, except I found a dental floss pick on top of the shelves near the coffee maker.” The reviewer gave it a moderate rating.

I reflect on my hotel experiences. Just as the worst US hotel I ever stayed in was far better than any of the ones I mention, so all of those were far better than not having a place to sleep at all. In each case, I had a bed. I wasn’t homeless, nor in a flood, nor an earthquake, nor a war zone. I didn’t feel unsafe, and in most cases I even had a roof over my head. And despite the threat of rats, bedbugs, scorpions, and frogs I got at least some sleep every night.

I think it may be a good practice to appreciate what we have rather than to obsess about how it could be better. Instead of “x out of 10”, perhaps hotel ratings should scaled: grateful, very grateful, and extremely grateful.

Note to my readers: I very much appreciate your interest and comments–please keep ’em coming!