Hotel SplendidoEnzyme writes, "what about awful hotels, B&Bs, or friends' houses where you've had no choice but to stay the night?"
What, the place in Oxford that had the mattresses encased in plastic (crinkly noises all night), the place in Blackpool where the night manager would drum to the music on his ipod on the corridor walls as he did his rounds, or the place in Lancaster where the two single beds(!) collapsed through metal fatigue?
Add your crappy hotel experiences to our list.
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chthonic, Thu 17 Jan 2008, 16:05)
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The Shah's favourite hotelThis isn't about a bad hotel so much as a wierd one.
Ramsar is a city on Iran's northern, Caspian, coast. The Grand Hotel there, apparently, had used to be the Shah's favourite. (There's a strange video of it here for the curious.)
I stayed there for a night in April 2004. It was plush and comfortable - in a 1970s kind of a way - and almost completely deserted. And it was huge, both in terms of the number of rooms, and the height of the ceilings. Because of the low number of guests, lighting was kept to a minimum - hence the rather eerie feeling of walking long, high, dim and utterly silent corridors.
It was sad, as much as anything. In the evening, after a dinner of sturgeon kebab (stick that, your Majesty!), I wandered to the bar. Being Iran, the bar was not a heaving drunken joint. Nevertheless, it was themed - roughly - along Scottish lines, with every possible soft furnishing covered in Royal Stuart tartan. It, too, was dimly-lit, and almost completely deserted, with the exception of the people from my party. The barman was heartbreakingly keen to sell us tea and ice-cream: he confided, though, that what he really wanted to do was to sell us cocktails, just as he had been employed to do to the Shah 25 years previously. Instead, he satisfied himself by giving us embossed cocktail twizzlers as souvenirs, and showing us around the (once again, dimly-lit) casino, the roulette wheel of which had not turned for a quarter of a century.
Outside, the weather was dreich and as melancholy as the atmosphere. As we sipped our tea, a lone microlite headed out over the Caspian, north towards Baku...
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 14:43,
7 replies)
I will have to go.Why did we (UK and Americans) fuck up so badly they had a revolution!
(, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 14:49, closed)
...we fucked up badly by deposing Mossadegh, imposing the Shah, and creating the revolution. I don't think it'll last, though: most of the population is under 30, they're educated, and most graduates are women. And everyone has satellite TV.
Iran is a wonderful country: great food, great people, great architecture, great archaeology. I miss it, and I was only there a fortnight. Good skiing, too, apparently.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 14:52,
closed)
Here's to......more use of the word dreich on b3ta!
(, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 14:58, closed)
DreichHad to look up the spelling, to be fair...
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 15:01,
closed)
Top wordage...as always!
It's refreshing to see such a use of 'proper England' on these pages
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Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Fri 18 Jan 2008, 17:52,
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AnotherAnother click for use of the word dreich. Brightened up my evening.
I don't like to think what that says about my evening....
(, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 22:21, closed)
Radiation!Just so you know, Ramsar has the highest level of natural radiation in the world, so that adds to your rather peculiar stay.... (check wiki or preferably something more reliable)
(, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 23:46, closed)
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