People are sometimes envious when they hear you work as a journalist and part of your job involves travel. But it isn’t always as glamorous as it sounds, especially when you have a travel curse and a knack of booking rubbish hotels run by lunatics.
Let me point out that I appreciate the perks and seeing new parts of the world is always welcome. However, I’ve gotten myself into a few scrapes by booking insanely cheap hotels to try to save my workplace money. Being someone who loves getting bargains for myself, I have a stupid need to save companies cash.
On this particular occasion I was heading to Prague on an evening flight and had booked a hotel conveniently located between where I had a meeting the next morning and an event in the evening. Perfectly logical, I thought. Well done me. And even better, it was a complete bargain.
But on my arrival I was greeted by a run down shack that looked more like a compound than a hotel and realised why it had been so cheap.
Being the sensible character I am, I hadn’t eaten any dinner – thinking I would dine in the hotel restaurant. Dragging my case along to reception, I could see no restaurant, but there was a fridge filled with takeaway-like foam boxes. However, as it was secured by a giant metal chain and padlock it didn’t look like I’d be eating any time soon.
Check in first and then worry about food, I told myself, but there was nobody to be found at the reception so I waited patiently for five minutes and then rang the bell. Still nobody appeared. For a further 15 minutes I rang that sodding bell, becoming increasingly irate. Eventually an old man emerged from a toilet in the corridor, looking red in the face and not particularly pleased to see me.
Who’s this delightful gent? I thought, as he grunted something and walked behind the receptionist’s desk. Oh great, this ray of sunshine works here. Talk about service with a smile.
“I’d like to check in,” I said, showing him my printed confirmation.
He glared at me like I was a turd he had scraped off the bottom of his shoe. With an expression of confusion and detest he growled some more in Czech and shoved the printout back across the counter.
“I have booked to stay here. Can I check in please?” I said anxiously.
For some reason this hit a nerve with the man and he started shouting, slamming his fists on the counter. In defence, I quickly switched into furious mode too and started shouting back, no idea what his problem was.
“I know you are probably frustrated you don’t understand me and I don’t know what you’re saying either, but I just want to check into my room,” I warbled.
Like a hairy, wrinkly wild boar, he screamed even louder. I frantically tried to load up Google Translate to work out what he was so furious about, but conveniently my phone wasn’t connecting. Eventually we managed to use made up sign language to sort of communicate enough for me to be given the keys to my room.
But wait, I was hungry and as the hotel was in the middle of nowhere I would need to get a taxi to find food. Bugger, I’d have to communicate with the demon again.
“Where is the near-est res-taur-ant?” I asked him slowly, over pronouncing every syllable.
His face turned even more puce. Uh oh, he was going to blow again. And royally let rip he did. I’ll never have any idea what about, but he certainly was not happy. What was this dude’s bloody problem?
Instead of trying to reason with this clearly psychotic character, I did the next most mature thing, I cried my eyes out. As I wiped a mixture of tears and snot across my face I saw that he had at least stopped shouting, but he still didn’t look sympathetic in the slightest. A young lady was bloody crying for heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with you, man?!
If I could give the hotel a review on Trip Advisor in pictorial form, this would sum up the five-star service I received…
Once again through the use of sign language and me repeatedly saying ‘taxi’, he called a cab for me. He then unexpectedly grabbed my extremely heavy suitcase and struggled with it up the stairs, muttering in Czech under his breath as it bounced off his ankles. This baboon of a man was actually going to attack me soon, I feared, so I best get back downstairs quickly.
The taxi arrived and – as the hotel seemed to be deserted like something out of The Shining – I was relieved to see another non-shouting human being. I must point out that I’m not so arrogant to expect everyone to be able to speak English, but you’d think the receptionist would have been able to speak a few phrases to allow him to welcome his guests from the UK with open arms. Yeah right.
I was ecstatic when I realised my taxi driver could understand me so I felt it necessary to tell him about the vile brute, much to his amusement. Realising I was in desperate need of some comfort in the form of a big, fat, greasy burger, the driver took me to a McDonalds drive-through and even ordered for me. Now this was more like the type of characters I had come across on previous trips to Prague – most polite and accommodating!
The taxi dropped me back at the compound gates and I was half tempted to ask the driver to wait while I grabbed my suitcase and then whisk me away to a hotel that didn’t employ possessed receptionists. But for some stupid reason I thought the worst must surely be over. Wrong.
I didn’t even make it past the reception desk without the ogre attacking. He bounded up to me shouting once again, what a surprise. With no clue what was going on still, I grasped my sad, little, oily McDonalds paper bag and screamed “I don’t understand you!”
He pointed up stairs and stormed past, beckoning me to follow him, so I sheepishly trundled up the stairs to my room. But before I could even make it to the bedroom I glanced across the hallway to find an almost translucently pale man in repulsive, off-white Y-fronts standing at the other end of the corridor. First a psychotic receptionist and now a creepy half naked skinny guy wandering the halls. What a luxurious stay this was turning out to be.
Hoping the loiterer in the halls was just waiting to use the toilet – as some of the rooms didn’t have them inside – I followed the shouty bastard into my room where he slammed his fist on the form I had left on the table. The beast grabbed it, shook it in the air and stormed off. He can keep that blasted form and shove it up his arse, I thought. I didn’t even know it was so important and certainly wouldn’t have kept it on purpose to rile him further.
Starving and shaken up, my face inhaled the Big Mac and downed the giant Sprite. Before I retired to bed I needed the toilet though. But wait, what was this behind the bizarre plastic curtain that was moulding away in the corner of the room? Much to my horror there was just a manky old shower with no toilet. The situation was making me more distressed by the minute.
What should I do? That scary Y-fronts creep might still be lurking in the corridor and I doubt my biggest fan, the angry receptionist, would help me if I got attacked. If anything, he’d probably join in the beating!
It will all be better in the morning, I reassured myself. But it was night time still and everything is scarier in the dark! So there was only one solution in such desperate times. That’s right, I urinated in the shower, washed the smudged mascara off my face and then climbed into the tiny rock hard bed – miserable and ashamed – and covered myself with a duvet the size of a flannel.
The next morning I realised how vilely that beast of a man had treated me and complained to the younger and less aggressive woman on reception. She was pretty useless and informed me the guy wouldn’t be around all day. Almost immediately after she told me this I spied the bastard walking past the window behind her, grimacing, with a fag in his mouth. She had lied – I could see him mocking me!
By this point I had no energy left and walked away from reception, deflated and confused by life. But my mood was to change when I was met by the friendly, sleepy Labrador below. Now that’s more like it. Every cloud…
Embracing the idiotic 