Top 10 Unusual Amenities

The following is a partial list of unusual amenities I've run across in the various places I've stayed during the last 3 months:

1. A coin-operated air conditioner. $1 bought you 3 hours of cold air. Which was about the length of time it took to get the room below oven temperature. At midnight I put in $2 and used my sweat as an alarm clock.

2. A room that had the fragrance of pine-scented disinfectant and cat urine. Try as I might, I never did get used to it.

3. Air conditioners that make as much noise as an idling tractor.

4. Rooms with no windows. And rooms with windows but no glass or screens.

5. Rooms which, during a rain storm, sound like a fire-cracker factory because of all the debris falling on the tin roof.

6. Towels that smelled like they’d been used to wrap a corpse. When I requested clean towels, the new ones smelled like they’d been used to wrap a corpse that had been buried for 3 years and then exhumed.

7. Pillow cases with fresh blood stains on them.

8. A room with a nest of highly venomous sea snakes under it. I almost stepped on one about 3 feet long one night.

9. The room with sea snakes under it had a door that wouldn’t close. Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep.

10. Showers that worked only occasionally, with no predictable pattern or schedule. Showers that produced only a trickle of cold, rusty water. Showers with so much mildew growing in them that they looked like a biology experiment gone waaaay wrong. Showers where you had to bathe in the dark while standing ankle deep in stagnant water. No shower at all…so I bathed where everyone else did...in the river where the drinking water came from.