Trzy Kafky,
a delight in central Krakow. My parents had stupidly asked me (a poor student) to book us a family room in an affordable hotel in krakow one year. However, our definitions of 'affordable' were slightly different from each other. To my parents it meant 'somewhere we won't be bankrupted, but neither will we be in extreme luxury', to me it meant 'somewhere we each get a bed and won't die too horribly'.

so i found this place on-line, and booked it. all seemed well until we were trudging through the streets of krakow looking for our lodgings. they were above an 'internet cafe' (money laundering den), and had somehow lost our booking. Sadly, before my mother could protest too loudly, they found it, in a mouldy ledger, and showed us to our room.

well, what a lovely place! we scrambled up a rickety outdoor metal fire escape, past the rats, cockroaches, and bed bugs which were scurrying AWAY from the room (it was that nasty), and we got to our room.

It was actually a series of chambers held together with mould and mucus and the pubes of previous occupants, and each chamber had a charming centre piece such as a bloodstained rug or a rotting carcass/mattress.

my mother and aunt took one look and both burst into tears.
my brother, sister and i found a chamber with 3 sagging mattresses in it and started looking for bodies/porn*. my father just collapsed in an exhausted heap, and muttered something about maybe looking elsewhere in the morning.

by this time it was close to midnight, so dad talked my mum and aunt into just staying 1 night, we'd look elsewhere in the morning.
so, we lay around in our chambers for a few hours, before getting up to prepare for a visit to auschwitz.

that was when we discovered the shower.
it was so encrusted with filth from previous occupants, that only a particularly short dwarf foetus would be able to climb under the rusty shower head. there were towels laid out, but not one of them was stain free (although we did have a variety of stains - blood and shit were the most popular). there was a crust/soap on a rope attached to the wall, and the whole thing smelt like 10 dying tramps on a hot day in an abbatoir.

we left...

on our way to a new hostel though, we saw a tramp, aslepp between his sandwich boards -boards which advertised our hostel. Lovely!

i'm not allowed to book hostels for my family ever again.

*in our previous hotel in slovakia, there was russian porn under the mattress - lots of men in bras and not much else. my brother vomited on the doorstep as we left that hotel. i'd booked that one too...
( ascorbate, Thu 17 Jan 2008, 20:59, Reply)