The worst room you've ever stayed in

[vsoy]

I had to take care of my mom in the hospital for a couple of days recently (she's doing much better and not there anymore). I was staying with an old friend and her parents in NYC but things were incredibly strained between her and her parents. She asked me to stay at my sister's house for a few days while things cooled down. I've had a falling out with my oldest sister and I'd rather sleep on the street than spend one night in her house. So I stayed in 2 hotels in the Elmhurst, Queens area. I stayed at the Pan Am on Queens Blvd for 2 nights and wasn't too impressed with what I paid for.

I canceled my reservation and took a room at one of those cheap places nearby. What a mistake. I've stayed in plenty of modest hotel rooms in my life but this one was the worst. The hotel manager was a good guy and must have noticed how clueless I was when I was asking about "long and short visits" He saved me a room at the end of the hall and it hit me what kind of place this was. It was the skeeziest room I've ever seen.

The bathroom was so frightening, I didn't use the shower. I kept all my bags zipped up and the bathroom light on to keep "little friends" away. The comforter had a huge hole in it and there was a plastic sheet underneath the bedsheet. Actually, I grew to appreciate the plastic sheet because that meant a)I wasn't touching mystery liquids from previous stays; b) no bedbugs. All my clothes smelled like cigarettes. It was the most depressing room I've ever been in and the only thing keeping me sane was watching mindless tv like "Search for the next Pussycat Doll".

It was dark and I was exhausted. I was in no mood to look for another room so I just hunkered down and lock the 2 extra locks on the door. I really can't imagine how call girls stomach working in such conditions or people using these places for rendezvous. *shivers*

And here's a lovely camera phone pic of the shower of horrors. Even with a crappy camera phone, you can still get shivers down your spine with this pic.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v734/vsoy/04-18-07_0827.jpg

[atlasien]

Oh man, I have a good one, and it's in New York too... I've stayed in some very very basic thatched-roof dirt-floor type accomodations in Mexico, but for sheer desperate filthiness, my choice would have to be the hotel on St. Mark's Place in the East Village in the mid-90s (I think it's called the St. Mark's Hotel). I was stuck there for a night because the friend I usually stayed with after my part-time night job was out of town and my backup had gone off somewhere.

It cost $40. The room was a tiny concrete cube and the only contents were a metal cot in the corner. I made no attempt to find the bathroom. The cot was covered by a blanket that was more cigarette burns than blanket. Through the holes I could see a dingy sheet with yellow stains. I laid down on top of the blanket fully clothed, with my overcoat and hood on, slept for five hours then leaped off the cot and ran away as soon as the sun came up.

Glad to hear your mother is doing better, vsoy.

[kimtae]

You guys need to try a $3 a night hostel in Bangkok. It was my first time there, I had booked during the peak season without also booking my hotel in advance, and the plane landed at midnight and the hotels where the taxi let me off were all sold out so this was what I could get after walking an hour to a dozen places at 2 AM and not wanting to drag my luggage around any more. The place was in a firetrap of a building in an alley that also served as the local toilet for the homeless. No towels, no sheets, no lock, one bare 40 watt bulb, whores and johns in and out all night in the other rooms until 6 AM, and a whole host of sleep mates re. roaches. Got up in the morning, went outside, and literally shook out every bag and piece of clothing in case the roaches had gotten inside.

[Kuroyama]

This one goes back about 5-6 years. I had just started gigging as a Field Engineer which means traveling all around the US doing SAN (storage area network) installs and teaching customers how to use RAID, fibre channel, disk, tape, whatever...). So at the time I didnt have my own credit card and my personal funds were tapped. The way it worked was, I went on a trip. Used my own funds which were then reimbursed to me about a few weeks later.

(The problem was, Id be back on the road a few weeks later... it meant I had a perpetual hole of about $1500 in my funds) There was no real incentive for the company to give me a company card because some wacko salesmen at some point in the past had done some less than savory entertainment with theirs and so the comapny was refusing to issue new cards. They would just route hotel and airfare charges to the company presidents card. OK, not the best system, but it works... until now.

I show up at some hotel/motel joint I think it was Buloxi <sp?> Mississippi. I roll up in my new rental Oldsmobuick in front of the place and come swingin in the front door looking as California Yuppie as I can. The old white guy at the desk didnt seem to be too pleased to see a man of Color doing well for himself, and I was happy to let him stew. Until I had to ask him to get my room. He claimed there was no reservation for me... "boy!" I explained that the home office had prepped everything. He asked me to produce the credit card it was paid for with. Since he had a copy of the faxed image of the card as well as my name on the reservation, he knew it wasnt my card and happy refused to allow me to stay using that fax.

It was about midnight and I had previously finished another job somewhere not far, but it WAS Mississippi, and all I knew about that place was the movie Mississippi Burning. I wasnt about to go traipsing around at night to get pulled over by some backwater deputy looking to put another plunger where the sun dont shine...

I called the comapny President and explained to him that this was part of the reason I couldnt understand the companys credit card policy, and I NEEDED my own!! But before we even thought about that, he needed to square away my hotel or I was going to go to the airport and sleep there (risking getting slapped with vagrancy in Ole Mississip!) My boss being Jewish had several experiences in his youth that helped him to understand what it meant to not be part of the "cultural majority". He squared away the room... and the bigger than thumb-sized palmetto bug that sauntered out of the room when I opened the room door made me feel about as welcome as the rest of the night had...

...The week I got back from that trip I was issued a company card.

[silkie]

Oh man, I have a good one, and it's in New York too... I've stayed in some very very basic thatched-roof dirt-floor type accomodations in Mexico, but for sheer desperate filthiness, my choice would have to be the hotel on St. Mark's Place in the East Village in the mid-90s (I think it's called the St. Mark's Hotel). I was stuck there for a night because the friend I usually stayed with after my part-time night job was out of town and my backup had gone off somewhere.

It cost $40. The room was a tiny concrete cube and the only contents were a metal cot in the corner. I made no attempt to find the bathroom. The cot was covered by a blanket that was more cigarette burns than blanket. Through the holes I could see a dingy sheet with yellow stains. I laid down on top of the blanket fully clothed, with my overcoat and hood on, slept for five hours then leaped off the cot and ran away as soon as the sun came up.

Glad to hear your mother is doing better, vsoy.


man, I used to live around the corner from there, and being NY is so gentrified now I assume the place is ok. At least it looks good on the exterior. But yeah, during the 90s St. Marks is considered a gritty neighborhood.


I think with myself, I can stay almost anywhere except where there are no roaches. That's why I cringed hearing Kimtae's story. Right now I am in HK, and I love old HK buildings, but I am hesitant in living in an old building because, despite HK being a really clean city, roaches are still rampant, more than I've seen in many other cities. Maogirl, does roach trap work?

In terms of the worse stay, it must be my stay in the Tibet mountains. Don't get me wrong, the place is considered luxurious by tibetan standards at that time, but it was really my attitude sickness that did me in.

I went with my sister, and we both caught the sickness. If you haven't experienced it, it is essentially the feeling of your head about to explode, couple with chills and dementia. So that night, my sister and I actually stayed under the same blanket in a tiny bed just to stay warm. We layered up on all the clothing we can find, even tide shit on our heads. In the middle of the night, I really need to piss. So I got up, and instead of heading to the bathroom, I knelt next to the other bed and plopped my head down there, trying to decide whether I should go to the bathroom beause it remotely located from the room and I have to trek through the cold. What's more, the toilet is literally a hole in the ground, and I fear in my conditions I would fall through it (the bathroom is located on a cliff and there is a two story drop from that hole).

After what seems like an enternity, I decided a better idea is to piss right out our hotel room door (it is just dirt outside, so no, I won't be pissing anywhere precious). Unfortunately, the wind blew the wrong direction and back at me.

The most fucked up thing is that we were so delerious my sister did not mind when I crawled back into bed...