Hotel California – The Eagles 1976

An interesting fact about my life, or maybe not if you are one of the many who think my life is not at all that interesting, is that I spend on average 3 weeks a month in hotels. For the millennials among you who know that FourSquare is not a kind of country dancing, I’ve managed to ‘check in’ 8 weeks in a row at hotels. In the pointless yet highly addictive game that is earning points on FourSquare, I beat my friends simply be being away, all of the time. 

Understated Italian Hotel Style

Spending hours whiling away my life in trains and airports, I’ve taken to reflecting upon the finer points of hotel service; finer points that I myself was once responsible for in a galaxy far, far away, in my former life on the red dirt, as an employee of InterContinental Hotels in Sydney. Working in a hotel is like joining the army; the dress code is as rigid^, the hierarchy as strictly observed, and it is a job destined for those young people who didn’t get good enough marks in high school to do what they really wanted to.

Hotels are designed to make the visitor feel at home, the people who work there are employed to make you feel welcome and the amenities in a hotel room are intended to bridge the gap between your house and theirs. So why is there a telephone in the toilet?

German Emergency Loo-Phone

I’ve lived in more than a dozen homes in my life. Just like hotels, these homes were furnished with a bed, a sink, a television and a toilet. Like a hotel, in these homes I have slept, I have washed, I have watched television, I’ve gone to the loo and I have often made phone calls. My enormous brain fails to comprehend is why hotels install telephones in the toilet. In all of the places I have lived, I have never felt the urge to pee come on at exactly the same time as the need to make a phone call, a phone call so urgent that it could not wait until after I had finished my ablutions.

Moreover in this the age of the Smartphone, does anyone even use the telephone in a hotel? On the numerous occasions I have slept in hotels, and they are super numerous, I’ve never actually used the telephone in the room other than to ask reception for a wake up call. Despite being adept at multitasking, the urge to request said wake-up call has never come upon me so urgently that I felt the need to make that call while sitting on the loo. Having even one phone beside the bed seems a waste of money, let alone an additional handset coated with other people’s bacteria and microscopic dots of crap installed inside of a room reserved for expelling material while reading a newspaper and not indulging in light conversation.

Breakfast in London including mini Flowerpot - just like at home...

My father was one of those people who lived for free stuff. He would never pay for a meal in a restaurant without eating every last mouthful…including the curly parsley garnish…because he had paid for it. He was what many an Australian refers to as a ‘mean-whinging-pom’*. He would not pay for us to go to the annual Royal Easter Show in Sydney and buy us Showbags because “you can go to Woolworths (Sainsburys or other) and buy the same chocolate in a much less fancy plastic bag for a quarter of the price”. One of the earlier memories I have of him was our first trip to Europe, I was ten, and he was almost forty. I was left in England with relatives while he and Motherbear travelled around 12 cities in Europe.

Thirty years later, I remember they visited twelve cities because when he returned to collect me in London, he had twelve different brands of tiny bottles of soap and shampoo, each one removed from each of the hotels in which he slept. He took it, even though he didn’t need it, because he had paid for it.

Nordic Minimalism in Stockholm

Today, in these terrorist-troubled times of not being able to carry on luggage that contains a bottle of anything larger than a tampon, I (perhaps foolishly) still check in my small suitcase, replete with normal sized bottles of shampoo and soap. I incur this additional inconvenience despite being afforded many an opportunity to pinch the little ones from the many hotels in which I find myself on a weekly basis. I don’t take them out of the rooms because despite being British and a bit of a whinger I am not mean, a credo to which I have strongly cleaved…until recently.

I have lately discovered a hotel that has teeny-weeny bottles of stuff that you actually want to take.  Indeed, I must be a snob, because I never took them, but now that it is Malin + Goetz, I have myself become a mean-whinging-thieving-pom, albeit a mean-whinging-thieving-pom who washes her hair at the gym with Cilantro Conditioner and Rum Body wash. Finally, a hotel that gives away something worth taking! 

Unlike the sewing kit.

I’ve given this one a lot of thought, and have significant personal experience. Being a fan of the twin Swedes that clothe the better part of the modern world, Hennes & Mauritz (that is H&M for the uninitiated) I wear more than my fair share of crappily constructed clothing sewn together in China. I have many a button that falls off, many a hem that drops down and many a seam that pops#. However, strangely perhaps, when I am in hotels, my buttons do not all spontaneously and simultaneously pop from the shirt upon which they are fastened. When I walk into a hotel I do not suddenly have the desire to sew up the many hems I have stapled, super-glued or blu-tacked into submission. When I am in a hotel, I do not think about sewing or darning, I think about how many hours of cable television I can squeeze into 24 hours. Why don’t they give you something small and handy that you might actually use?

I don’t polish my shoes everyday. Those who see me regularly know that I usually wear patent leather shoes eliminating the need to polish them at all, let alone daily. So why oh why do hotels spend thousands of very un-eco-friendly dollars on such frippery as shoe sponges. I’ve lately learned that the good folk of Germany must also have difficulty shoeing themselves on normal days. Hotels in the Bundesrepublik come with not just the sponge, but also a mini shoehorn. Maybe after drinking ten jugs of beer a day the Deutscher struggle to bend over and slip on their boots.

Many a time I’ve forgotten toothpaste, a toothbrush or a razor to sort out my unruly legs, so why don’t they give us toothbrushes instead of a showercap? Even so, I have never ever, not in this lifetime or any other that I remember, walked into a hotel and thought to my sweet self, “bugger, I forgot my boot polish and shoehorn!”

Little bottle of milk for coffee (I took that)

And then there is breakfast.

Everyone is different. Some people scull a coffee and walk out the door, healthier people sit down to fruit and yoghurt, the good patriots of China eat congee and the United Kingdom fries the best part if a pig every morning for breakfast. As for me, an Australian lass born and bred, I eat two slices of grain toast with Vegemite, simple, reliable and packed with Vitamin B and thanks to the travel tubes of veggie, available in every single city I visit.

The cornucopia that is spread across a buffet in a hotel at 6am blows my mind. If there were only four types of bread, would anyone actually complain? Four kinds is three more than your average human being has in their pantry at home. If there were only regular full fat milk, would you refuse to eat your cereal? If the orange juice was only pedestrian orange and not Spanish Seville blood orange, would you call the United Nations and plead diplomatic immunity? Do you eat eggs, bacon, sausages and hash browns every single morning? Do you need to eat it when you are in a luxurious five-star hotel and not stranded like a refugee in a McDonalds?

Three kinds of yoghurt, no Vegemite

Why then do most hotels spread out forty-five kinds of baked flour and yeast? Not just sliced grain and sliced white but little rolls and pastries and ten kinds of berry jam and salted butter and unsalted butter and cheese and pate an ham and salad and salmon and despite this they still don’t have bloody Vegemite…

 

 

Bring your Own Vegemite in Berlin

*For the foreigners, mean in this context refers to their tightness rather than their personality

#Although that may be down to my penchant for Foie Gras and Frites more than the quality of the workmanship

^Frustrated and broke after putting a finger through my black nylons almost every morning, my time at IHG was cut tragically short

Comments

[Tonybullant@gmail.com]

I remember once winning the race to the aircraft toilet and souveniring the free toothbrush and toothpaste.
After we left the airport your dad triumphantly produced the BA blanket :)