Hotels/Motels

[IdleRich]

I hardly ever get to stay in a hotel and so they hold a strange fascination for me. I think of them as magically romantic places, a bit like railway stations in that respect I guess. And as for motels, even more so as I've never stayed in one, I don't even know if they exist in Europe but I love the idea of sitting on the bed of one with my shirt off and an ashtray on my sweaty chest, chain-smoking and drinking jack from the bottle to try and numb the pain from the wound in my shoulder while flicking through the tv channels to check if the police are on to me yet. Nervously getting up every now and again to peak through the blinds and see if my partner is back with the stuff.

But even without all that, there is something quite special about having this place temporarily of your own. For me they represent adventure. A place where you can mess it up as much as you like every day and someone will clean it up for you. The only problem is the stupidly early check-outs; whenever I do stay somewhere the first thing I do is try and negotiate a late checkout which they almost always refuse by pretending someone is checking in to that room the second I am due to leave. This in turn always ensures that I have a mad scramble to get ready when I leave and possibly some kind of fight with staff when I fail.

Even when I'd sold my flat but had to sort a few things in London so I rented a hotel room round the corner I found myself acting like I was on holiday for a few days - put a serious dent in the money I got from the sale in fact.

When I used to come back from Lisbon to London regularly there was this seedy place in Dalston that I always used to stay at and for some reason, getting fucked up on its horribly worn red carpets while gazing out the window at a brick wall or carpark was always especially enjoyable.

But at the other end of the scale, I would love to stay somewhere posh with 24 hour room service and a mini-bar that I wasn't afraid to raid. I've read a number of books set in the US in the past in which people just lived full time in hotels, to me that sounds like the absolute height of luxury, but maybe it was simply relatively easier or cheaper in those times. I seem to remember he lived in a hotel in Ask The Dust but could hardly afford to eat so I dunno how it works.

Anyway, tell me hotel tales - especially good if you've worked in one, I can well imagine that from the staff side you see some crazy things - or just recommend some interesting hotels, - plus good filmsbookssongs set in them or where they are important. I dunno, I just think hotels are magical, prove me right.

 

[william_kent]

my favourite rap lyrics:

Hotel
Motel
Holiday Inn

it was all downhill from there

 

[william_kent]

so..

I used to work with a recovering alcoholic

she told me a story about how she had been booked into a travel lodge by work, and she had been imbibing, and then she thought she'd have a bath, so she ran the taps, but maybe a bit of a snooze first is in order

12 hours later and she emerges from her "nap" and the room is a foot deep in water

she turned the heating on full blast in an effort to "evaporate" but the puddle was not getting any smaller, so a rapid exit via the fire escape was called for

amazingly she got away with that, unlike the time she stole a child's bike and then discarded it a canal once she had reached her destination - she admits that particular episode that was a "low point"

 

[william_kent]

have you read this?


Gay Talese - The Voyeur's Motel

I'm undecided whether this is documentary or fiction - although I do have a theory that any written word is essentially fiction....

but quick summary, motel owner builds false ceiling so he can perv on the guests

the motel owner's main insight seemed to be that only the lesbians seemed to be enjoying themselves or experiencing any form of "love"

 

[IdleRich]

have you read this?

View attachment 15025
Gay Talese - The Voyeur's Motel

I'm undecided whether this is documentary or fiction - although I do have a theory that any written word is essentially fiction....

but quick summary, motel owner builds false ceiling so he can perv on the guests

the motel owner's main insight seemed to be that only the lesbians seemed to be enjoying themselves or experiencing any form of "love"

I've not read it, no.

Reminds me of HH Holmes and his murder hotel - stories of which are also greatly exaggerated I think.

Murder Castle - H.H. Holmes, Chicago World's Fair & Layout | HISTORY

The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—known at the time as the Columbian Exposition—celebrated the 400th anniversary Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. However, the Chicago fair became better known for the so-called “Murder Castle” of H.H. Holmes, America’s first documented serial killer.

www.history.com

 

[Slothrop]

I hardly ever get to stay in a hotel and so they hold a strange fascination for me. I think of them as magically romantic places, a bit like railway stations in that respect I guess. And as for motels, even more so as I've never stayed in one, I don't even know if they exist in Europe but I love the idea of sitting on the bed of one with my shirt off and an ashtray on my sweaty chest, chain-smoking and drinking jack from the bottle to try and numb the pain from the wound in my shoulder while flicking through the tv channels to check if the police are on to me yet. Nervously getting up every now and again to peak through the blinds and see if my partner is back with the stuff.

You get the comedy F1 Motel type things - built like a prison, you turn up, key in your booking number, get a code for the door and for your room door, never see another human. We've used them when we're heading into France on climbing trips because they cost next to nothing and they're fine so long as all you want is seven hours of sleep before getting back in the car. They don't really fit the American motel archetype, though, they feel more like something out of one of the scuzzier corners of a William Gibson novel.

 

[martin]

Until COVID, I wangled a lot of overseas work trips, so have stayed at loads of hotels, from small Japanese joints to a ship in Hamburg to massive Singaporean skyscrapers with colour-changing LED-lit bars and enormous fountains between the elevators. There was one in Skagen where the room had a fireplace and a dead polar bear rug, and you could hear the December winds howling around outside…wish I could have stayed there longer than 2 nights.

My first experience of St James’ Hotel in New Orleans was a giant rat running across the street when the airport shuttlebus dropped me off outside, past midnight. The room had a dim lamp, antique cupboards and a trunk, faded floral carpeting, a creepy wooden owl and…bloodstains up the curtains. Felt like I’d been dropped into a 1930s murder scene. But I really liked this hotel by the end of the week, especially as the old lady on ‘reception’ was always calling me honey child and mothering me. Something very southern gothic about the place, and I even learned to appreciate the owl – but never asked about the bloodstains. Heard it’s been renovated since.

Also, sadly I’ve never stayed here, but Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans has a revolving bar. If you ever had a teacher tell you you’d amount to nothing, I highly recommend you go there, take a seat and order a whiskey sour, and savour your victory (even if temporarily) as you slowly rotate around the bar. Plus, it has a Purple Rain-style live band area.

Stayed at an upmarket one in St Petersburg with a nightclub in the basement, all these prostitutes used to roam the corridors 24/7 making little ‘waving at you’ gestures as they walked past. But you’d also get these male prostitutes for female guests (I would’ve guessed gay, but our Russian host told us otherwise), who hung out in the lobby. They looked like they were in Sigue Sigue Sputnik - wrap around shades, headbands, red sleeveless leather jackets, PVC trousers, glittery jackets and garish moonboots. That hotel also made the best screwdrivers ever.

Also stayed in a bad one, La Quinta Inn in Houston. Something so off about this place: you know hotel hospitality’s always going to be a bit fake, but the staff were practically rictus-grinning with what looked like sheer contempt in their eyes. I couldn’t wait to leave, really hated it. Found out later one of the maids got shot to death in her car round the back. Also, when that cop killed Daniel Shaver after making him crawl along the corridor in a hotel in Arizona, that was a La Quinta Inn branch – and the corridor carpet pattern was exactly the same as the one in Houston.

Could bang on more, but yeah, the attraction’s the adventure and the break from your usual reality. I used to wonder what these impeccably turned out concierges in Dubai, Manila and Tokyo, calling me sir and having a joke and a laugh, would think if they could see me going back home to a crumbling one-bed flat on Blackstock Road.

 

[martin]

I used to know this American who ran a 'news for seafarers' service - each day, he basically looked up 15-20 news stories online and wrote little 200-word summaries of each one, then emailed them to his office, which would send them out over satellite to any ships that had subscribed. He was always looking for sponsor companies to put their banners on the enews, so he spent all year travelling to maritime events around the world, just schmoozing people and trying to pick up deals.

He once said "I live in a suitcase 360 days a year, except for Thanksgiving and Xmas", and I thought: yeah, that sounds alright. Think he got his wife to sort out the boring stuff like home repairs, bills, insurance, kids' education, etc, while he hopped from hotel to hotel, doing about an hour of actual work a day.

 

[shakahislop]

hotels for business travellers have a certain kind of depressing affect

grimy shit hotels, the cheapest hotel in town, cheap hostels, these ones feel like they get closer to the heart of travelling to me. bad for sleeping in or being comfortable in obviously. all this stuff gets less interesting but more pleasent the more money you spend

 

[version]

You get the comedy F1 Motel type things - built like a prison,

There's a flip of this in City of Quartz where Mike Davis talks about a particular LA prison.

This postmodern Bastille - the largest prison built in a major US urban center in generations - looks instead like a futuristic hotel... The interior of the prison is designed to implement a sophisticated program of psychological manipulation and control: barless windows, a pastel color plan, prison staff in preppy blazers, well-tended patio shrubbery, a hotel-type reception area, nine recreation areas with nautilus workout equipment, and so on... As one inmate whispered to me in the course of a tour, 'Can you imagine the mindfuck of being locked up in a Holiday Inn?'

 

[IdleRich]

amazingly she got away with that, unlike the time she stole a child's bike and then discarded it a canal once she had reached her destination - she admits that particular episode that was a "low point"

Chucking it in the canal did seem like an unnecessarily vindictive end to that episode, couldn't she have just left it by the road?

 

[william_kent]

recently I went on holiday in Taiwan

my host promised "all expenses paid"

but when it came to our trip to the capital, Taipei, I didn't realise that she had booked us on the "homeless in Taipei experience"

it started out with "Uncle Li" showing us the tricks of the trade when it came to rummaging through bins looking for recyclables that we could "weigh in"







and continued with "Auntie Lou" showing us how to organise your pile of crap onto a shopping cart






and culminated in us spending two nights in a 24 hour Manga cafe...



see that sliding door?

it leads to a cushioned room...



sure, it's cheap, but I got no sleep because of the guy on night one who had a chest condition and hacked away, and on the second night a couple of guys decided they were going to "gobble" at each other and the moans were a bit... well, not conducive to sleep shall we say...

but it was cheap

 

[IdleRich]

I dunno if that counts as a hotel but I'll allow it cos it sounds as though you had a miserable experience, I don't want to make it worse.

 

[mind_philip]

Stayed in a few classic US motels when I took the greyhound bus cross-country in my early 20s.

Now I live here, I think the mystique is if anything even greater. The country is just so fucking vast. In the UK you can't really imagine setting off on a journey in the morning, driving for a whole day and still being nowhere near your destination.

 

[Slothrop]

Now I live here, I think the mystique is if anything even greater. The country is just so fucking vast. In the UK you can't really imagine setting off on a journey in the morning, driving for a whole day and still being nowhere near your destination.

Insert jokes about the North Circular here.