Travel ecstasy
Budget hotels from Berlin to Bali: Stay in Madras for $4, Tokyo for $37, or New York for $99. Excerpt from the book 'Cheap Hotels' by Daisann McLane
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In New York City, I already sleep in a place that says, "This is who I am." That place is my apartment. But when traveling, I am looking for something else. Not a room that reflects some fantasy version of me, but one that tells me, in some small way, about the people I'm visiting.
The first thing I do when I enter any hotel room for the first time is open all the shades and curtains. The room is my first window on a new place, an unexplored culture, and I want to make sure I can see as much as possible. The Hotel al-Hussein, in Cairo's old Khan el-Khalili district, had stained sheets and dust balls-but it also had a little balcony overlooking the city's largest and most splendid mosque. I checked in. Outside my four-dollar, no-sheets-or-towels single at the Broadlands Lodging House in Madras, wedding parades led by trumpeters and jewel-bedecked elephants drifted past my open wooden shutters. Parades, religious processions, clanging gongs, rhythmic chants and unexplained animal noises have all, at one time or another, enriched my hotel room experience.
Sometimes, as in the case of the "Liberace Room" at San Antonio's Painted Lady Inn, my hotel room window looks out on nothing more interesting than a side alley. But when alley-facing rooms are dripping in chandeliers and hung with gold-framed portraits of Liberace, how can you complain to the management? Once on a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I got to stay in a bona-fide luxury hotel room. Asian currencies were collapsing, and the Malaysian government had frozen the ringgit, which was suddenly worth about 40-percent less dollars than it had been a few weeks before. Seizing the instant, I booked a room at the Shangri-La (could a hotel chain have a more perfect name?) for $82-less than the price of a Quality Inn in Houston.
The room, of course, was a perfection of marble tubs and gilded faucets, gold damask upholstery, and fresh orchids on the nightstand. Actually, they might have been lilies. When hotel rooms are perfect, I often forget the details.
Here's what I do remember: A forest of steel building skeletons and construction cranes frozen motionless outside my 14th-story picture window. In Malaysia, the "tiger" economy had stopped, abruptly, in mid-roar. Thanks to the room, what I had understood from abstract headlines was now visible and concrete. Oh, and I remember one other thing-a sign, on the refrigerator, that said, "Guests are requested to not bring Durian fruit into the room."
Perhaps this is not the kind of memory one expects to carry home from Shangri-La. But it is among the best of mine.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
In New York City, I already sleep in a place that says, "This is who I am." That place is my apartment. But when traveling, I am looking for something else. Not a room that reflects some fantasy version of me, but one that tells me, in some small way, about the people I'm visiting.
The first thing I do when I enter any hotel room for the first time is open all the shades and curtains. The room is my first window on a new place, an unexplored culture, and I want to make sure I can see as much as possible. The Hotel al-Hussein, in Cairo's old Khan el-Khalili district, had stained sheets and dust balls-but it also had a little balcony overlooking the city's largest and most splendid mosque. I checked in. Outside my four-dollar, no-sheets-or-towels single at the Broadlands Lodging House in Madras, wedding parades led by trumpeters and jewel-bedecked elephants drifted past my open wooden shutters. Parades, religious processions, clanging gongs, rhythmic chants and unexplained animal noises have all, at one time or another, enriched my hotel room experience.
Sometimes, as in the case of the "Liberace Room" at San Antonio's Painted Lady Inn, my hotel room window looks out on nothing more interesting than a side alley. But when alley-facing rooms are dripping in chandeliers and hung with gold-framed portraits of Liberace, how can you complain to the management? Once on a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I got to stay in a bona-fide luxury hotel room. Asian currencies were collapsing, and the Malaysian government had frozen the ringgit, which was suddenly worth about 40-percent less dollars than it had been a few weeks before. Seizing the instant, I booked a room at the Shangri-La (could a hotel chain have a more perfect name?) for $82-less than the price of a Quality Inn in Houston.
The room, of course, was a perfection of marble tubs and gilded faucets, gold damask upholstery, and fresh orchids on the nightstand. Actually, they might have been lilies. When hotel rooms are perfect, I often forget the details.
Here's what I do remember: A forest of steel building skeletons and construction cranes frozen motionless outside my 14th-story picture window. In Malaysia, the "tiger" economy had stopped, abruptly, in mid-roar. Thanks to the room, what I had understood from abstract headlines was now visible and concrete. Oh, and I remember one other thing-a sign, on the refrigerator, that said, "Guests are requested to not bring Durian fruit into the room."
Perhaps this is not the kind of memory one expects to carry home from Shangri-La. But it is among the best of mine.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Cheap Hotels
Hardcover, 16.5 x 22.2 cm (6.5 x 8.7 in.), 192 pages
$ 19.99
$ 19.99
Budget hotels from Berlin to Bali
