People who know me know: when it comes to staying or vacation, I avoid all the luxury. I’d rather chop off my right hand than going to sleep in a hotel. Infinity pools, luxury breakfast buffets and spacious hotel suites? No way.
I prefer to go into the wilderness with a tent and a few dirty socks in my backpack. Living on a few apples, some berries and rainwater. An incidental rabbit that I pull out of the bushes with bare hands, and roast on a fire. Sleeping on the cold rock soil, pooping behind a bush, and stinking nice in a wool sweater without a toilet or (warm) running water – that is life.
But sometimes it is not accepted if I want to sleep in a cardboard box in the parking lot during a congress, during a city trip in an alley, or in a sleeping bag under the Hollywood Sign. And I must be in a hotel.
What strikes me then: always the same 17 things that I am worse about. Sometimes I wonder: would hotel owners ever sleep in their rooms themselves? Then would we have been redeemed of all those hotel extras? They come.
1 Check -in the endless check -in. With passport, driver’s license, zip codes and telephone numbers. While you have already passed on everything, but then – to your underpants size – online. And then they are still tapping keyboards for hours at receptions. Why?
2 The heat in your room. Or the cold. Because the heating is not possible, or because there is an air conditioner hanging that you blow to the tering like an overstrained fighter jet. In a hotel room you always wake up like a dried -out peen.
3 The hip glass bathroom doors. Which means you have full view of your patchy partner. Or the ‘shower door that stops halfway’. Which means you have a swimming pool in your room after every shower.
4 The shower buttons for which you need a university degree. And who eventually give a cowardly ray that goes from glowing hot to ice cold. And back. The hand shower that you can only hang at stomach height if you want to soap. The ‘rain shower’ under which you stretch your neck if you want to keep your hair dry.
5 The hair dryer. He is skillfully hidden in a secret place, blows like a cowardly wet wind, looks like he has experienced the First World War, and for which a socket is never available next to a mirror. Or even worse: the hair dryer that – logically – is attached to the wall with a two -centimeter cord.
6 The breakfast buffet. That consists of a few dry sandwiches, coffee that has been on a pile all night, the gray scrambled eggs that looks like an experiment from NASA, and a vague meats board that is nicely sweating.
7 The hotel pool. That in the photo has an Olympic size, but in reality it turns out to be a bathtub that is closed, ice cold, ‘under construction’, or all at the same time.
8 The ‘sea view’. That you can only see if you push yourself three meters horizontally out of the window. Or the room with ‘view’ – in the parking lot, the air conditioners, a blind wall, the garbage containers or the back of another room, where a tourist in his underpants is in bed.
9 The minibar that suddenly starts to steal like an old walrus at night. With bottles of 12.50 euros. “No, the bottles of water that stood next to your bed were not included.”
10 The ‘Free WiFi in the entire hotel’. Who only works at the reception – if you stand in a certain angle and keep one leg up – and even then is still slower than 3G in an abandoned pasture.
11 The noisy rooms! Or the closed side door! So that you can hear the peeing man next to you three times a night in a bare tube clatter, or even worse: the neighbors who are playing doctor.
12 The window that cannot be opened. While the previous guest was quite bothered by flatulence.
13 The lighting. Who must be operated with a button panel next to your bed. There is always one lamp that does not go out. Shame.
14 The flashing lights at night. From the TV, the smoke detector, the refrigerator, the motion sensor, the telephone, the thermostat and the alarm clock so that you fear that you will either have brain damage, or in a game hall.
15 The ‘Kingsize’ bed. That consists of two separate beds that slide apart as soon as you lie on it, and that is always much too tightly tucked in !! Which gives you a cramp from the loosening. The two thick pillows, instead of a thick and a thin, giving you neck cramp as a belly sleeper. As a back sleeper too.
16 The ironing board (??). Which you never need, but always flicker on your head if you want to grab something out of the closet. The four clothes hangers, for two people.
17 The reception employee who will ‘pass on’ if you have complained about something. Sure Joh. O man.
I can’t wait until I am in my tent again.