Our Little Hole In The Wall

We are supposed to be aloof of circumstance. That is to say, that we aspire to be such that our internal states are independent of external realities. Meaning, if our hotel room is crappy, we want to be happy anyway.

More than that, we think that it is admirable to be able to set aside the mundane realities of our external experience when settling upon our internal states. Or, put another way, we look down upon those who seem to simply mirror in their feelings the beauty that does or does not surround them.

Taking all of this into account, how do you decide on a hotel?

Since leaving the United States, we have spent progressively less and less on each successive hotel/apartment. It is perhaps worth pointing out here that we are only booking our stays and making our travel arrangements two to three days in advance (the pros and cons of which might merit a separate post at a later date). The expected outcome of this downward spiral of accommodations is predicable: eventually, we would end up in a dive.

And it happened… in Irkutsk. Nothing against Irkutsk, it appears to be a lovely town in the eight hours that we have spent here. The same can’t be said for our accommodations.

They are interesting, that can’t be understated. Downstairs there appears to be some sort of oriental museum with blank-faced department store mannequins wearing ethnic hats and a room full of creepy aristocrat-era dolls forever imprisoned in glass cases. Quirky art projects are glued to the walls and hanging from the ceilings (think, colorful spider webs that snared yellow sunglass lenses, artificial flowers, and tiny plastic figurines). Black and white portraits of stern-faced Russian writers pressure you to make proper use of the public leather reading chair in the alcove at the top of the spiral stairs. Unusual accommodations, to say the least.

And they are cheap. I can’t say how cheap because I’m embarrassed that I even took the listing seriously. (At the sight of the dilapidated haunted-mansion-style exterior, which the listing called “Bohemian,” our Russian-speaking taxi driver gave a meaningful questioning glance and refused to leave.) I will say that the floor is unsettlingly spongy and smelly, the bed is more like a nest of squeaky springs than a mattress, and there isn’t a single clean surface in our bathroom. At least the lights work. Supposedly, we get breakfast in the morning. We’ll see what that means. The breakfast room looked like it had been attacked by a pack of dogs. After dinner, we looked in again, and it was clean and had balloons on the floor.

They seem to like balloons. Our rooms had balloons after they prepared them for us. No towels. But lots of balloons.

It’s hard to know what is essential. In life, in accommodations, in lots of things. We get to choose what the time in this hotel means to us. To do otherwise is ceding the power of creating out experience to some external source—in this case, a hotel or the website we booked it through, or the overly generous reviewers who said it was nice here.

I get to choose whether or not I like this day of my life and I choose to like it. But, I also get to choose where I stay in the future, and it might be in nicer places than this one. This stay might be the nadir of our accommodation choices (and this entire post might exist so that I could use the word ‘nadir’ in a sentence—totally worth it).

I’m going to bed now to dream of a nice, clean Hampton Inn. Goodnight.

P.S. Our bed has a shower curtain on it in lieu of a comforter. Still no towels.