I am going to take a break from writing “about absolutely nothing at all” and write about some events that were definitely “something”… our biggest travel disasters. Yes, bad things can happen to you when you travel, even to those of us who think we are confident world travellers.
So, let me tell you about the three most alarming and unsettling events that have taken place in our travels over the years. I would have to preface this by saying that over the years, and in spite of the inordinate amount of international travel we have done, we have not had that many unsettling events take place. Hence, I can only relate three, of what I consider to be, very serious travel disasters.
For no particular reason, I am going to do these in reverse order. As you know, I like to use photos to enrich the details in my writing and I will attempt to do so here as well. Unfortunately, two of the three event events happened so long ago that I don’t have any photos that directly relate to the problem… I was too upset to take pictures. :-)That said, I will throw out a few photos around the dates of these events.
And because I can see the humour in just about absolutely anything, these retellings will take on a humourous … at least I hope you think it’s humorous… tenor. It will be a tenor that certainly wasn’t involved in the events at the time they were unfolding.
So, “Sherman set the Wayback Machine for” 2023.
The Great Jumbo Shrimp Debacle of 2023
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I do have photos associated with this most recent disaster. So, let me kick things off with the photo that played a significant role in my screwing up monumentally. We were sitting and eating in one of my favourite locales, the restaurants on the sidewalk outside the Malaga market. This tale began when I looked over at a group of three people sitting at a table beside us and noted that the waiter had brought them the platter of jumbo shrimp featured in this first photo.
You can tell I was smitten with the appearance of these tasty objects by the fact that I bothered to take a picture of somebody else’s food. I did not see this offered anywhere on the menu, so I pointed at the platter on the other table and asked the waitress “Cuánto cuesta” i.e. “How much does it cost?”.
Footnote – central to the story is that my Spanish is fairly limited, and the waitress’s understanding of English was virtually nonexistent.
Her response was to point over to a chalkboard menu like the one featured in the photo below. I just took this photo a few weeks ago and as you can see the Langostinos Jumbo are still listed, but last year they were costed as €14.95.
I was thrilled to see that this delightful offering was so inexpensive. So, I pointed at the platter on the other table and asked for the same for us.
A few minutes later she returned and asked in Spanish whether I would like Seis (six) or Ocho (eight) shrimp. There were four of us… I was thinking of two each… I say Ocho. I was perplexed as to why there was a choice between six and eight.
I assume at this point you have already figured out where this is headed.
BUT, this was going to be a great lunch! We were happy, and the Love-goddess’ former colleague and her husband were happy. All is good!
“Carrousel” Once again I am using a “Carrousel” format to present the photos in the best possible manner. If you click on the first photo (top-left) in a grouping, the whole thing pops up allowing you to click through the collection of images in a large format.
I should add that we all had already selected an item for our lunch and that I saw the platter as simply being an extra enhancement to our meal. Oh… And I was going to pay for lunch as a treat for our friends who had agreed to come and eat in one of our favourite spots. The plot thickens.
We were finishing off our entrées as “la pièce de resistance” arrived and we demolished it!
This is the point at which this tale begins to unravel.
After we were all satiated I caught the eye of our server and asked for “La Cuenta”… The bill. She gave me a bit of a nod with a disconcerting look on her face. Five minutes later still no Cuenta. I asked another server, and he gave me the same slight nod and disconcerting look.
The ladies then went off in search of “el baño” and we waited, and waited, and waited.
At this point, I was thinking to myself I could just wander off and do a dine-and-dash. And then I began to wonder if this delay was all about providing me with an opportunity to dine-and-dash???
After at least five more minutes of contemplating how long it was taking, a young man was sent out with La Cuenta. It is at this point that reality reared its ugly head! I had deluded myself into thinking I was paying €14.95 for a platter of jumbo shrimp when in fact I was going to have to pay €14.95 for each of the shrimp. €14.95 is approximately $22.44 at current exchange rates. $22.44 per shrimp for eight jumbo shrimp… Oooops! $22.44 times eight. You do the math.
Between borrowing money from Bruce and what I had on me, I managed to scrape together the 200+ dollars required to pay for lunch. OUCH!!!!! Lesson learned
The Shocking Beijing Hotel Tragedy of 2002
The Love-goddess is not allowed to book hotel rooms… anywhere… ever. And the “shocking Beijing hotel tragedy” is only one of many reasons. The Love-Goddess is guided by her Scottish genetic predisposition towards not spending money, even though she’s a reasonably affluent woman. And this proclivity towards a compulsive level of thriftiness has unfortunately surfaced every time she has booked a hotel room for our use. The absolute zenith of this took place in Beijing.
A little background information to begin. If you have ever been to Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario or Bar Harbor in Maine you would probably think, there is no way you could find a bad hotel in either of those two high-end fancy towns. You would be wrong. Incredibly difficult but not impossible.
In Niagara-on-the-Lake, we did spend one night in the room she booked, but the fighting couple in the adjoining room kept us awake all night so I found us alternative accommodation the following morning. We would’ve been switching hotels even without the Bickersons in the next room. It felt like we were living in someone’s grandmother’s attic.
When we pulled up to the motel in Bar Harbour, I asked to see the room before we checked in. Upon viewing it, I immediately told the manager we would not be staying there. He was furious and demanded that I give him US$10 as compensation. Best US $10 I have ever spent in my life. I found us a lovely room at a Best Western hotel close by.
The Love-goddess had one last chance in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Unfortunately, this ended her hotel booking career forever. In all fairness, I cannot remember the exact dates of any of these misadventures and the Beijing one might’ve been the first or it might’ve been the last and final nail driven into the booking coffin.
But, amongst all those rental adversities, the Beijing fiasco stands out the most because it felt like we had checked into the Bates Motel and there was no chance that we would ever be checking out… Terrifying!
In all fairness, she did not actually book the “hotel” herself. I will call it a hotel, but I think it was really a hostel. We had diverted from our original preplanned route around the world in 2002 to go to Beijing because she was able to tee up some presentations with a faculty member from the University of Beijing, “Mah”, whom she had met while we were staying in Hong Kong. The organizer of one of these events offered to book a hotel but she made the mistake of asking the Love-goddess what sort of price range she would be looking for… cue the spooky music.
The Interesting Start to the Story
The story begins the moment we arrive in Beijing. As we step out of the airplane onto the boarding bridge, Mah is standing there with a man in uniform. The man in uniform turns out to be Mr. Shen who I think MIGHT have been the head of security for the airport. He was a friend of Mah’s. Apparently, if you know someone involved in security at the airport you get to go into the restricted areas and meet your friends as they step off the plane… Who knew?
Mr. Shen guided us through the arrival area and diverted us away from the long checkout lines. He took us to a private area where diplomats and their families go through customs. There were a couple of families lined up but when we arrived Mr. Shen strolled to the front of the line and said to the customs inspector something that must have been along the lines of, “We are coming through… immediately.” I don’t believe the customs official even had a look at our passports. And to this day I am fairly certain that we were In China illegally.
That notwithstanding, we got out of the airport and Mah got us into a cab. Mr. Shen went his way with our gratitude. Things started to run afoul as soon as we got to the “hotel”. I could tell simply by looking at Mah’s face that she was not impressed with where we would be staying and was obviously worried about us being able to function during our stay.
It is hard to know exactly what was being said when two people were going back-and-forth in a heated discussion in Mandarin but my take on it, and as Mah reported to us, the discussion was about whether this place would be able to accommodate us because we spoke only English and there was no Internet. Whoever the clerk was, she convinced Mah that everything would be fine and that we would be in good hands. She had lied, of course.
The following photo is not the actual room we stayed in, but it is a photo from a dumpy hotel in Beijing that I found recently by searching the web. However, it very closely resembles the appearance of our room. Our “hotel” was a converted student residence at a then-closed nursing school.
To begin with, there was no elevator and we had to schlep our large heavy bags up to the fourth floor on our own. As soon as I saw the room I was ready to leave. The Love-goddess’ argument for staying was that we had to adhere to Chinese culture. And what that meant was that if we left and went elsewhere the woman who booked the room for us would “lose face”. I wasn’t buying the argument, but I acquiesced and said we would give it a go for one night.
There was a converted cafeteria that served as the hotel restaurant, so we went down there to eat. Of course, none of the staff spoke a word of English, and there was no menu with pictures, so we simply conveyed to them that we wanted something to eat by pointing at our mouths. In the end, they brought us some rice and a dish that I swear was sweet-and-sour chicken balls. Everyone else was having a wonderful-looking meal and we were getting what they thought we might like.
That night we could not even read our books because the wattage of the lightbulbs was so low. The nightstand between the beds had a light inside the opening and if you slipped what you needed to read into the opening there was enough light to get the job done. The Love-Goddess had to check some notes about her presentations. My thought was that the photo I found was a good choice for this article… There’s a nightstand that looks like the one we had, and the out-of-focus photo metaphorically represents our inability to read.
The next morning the Love-goddess was still not convinced that we should leave, but then things directly affecting her ability to conduct business started to fall off a cliff. First, there was no coffee to be had in the entire hotel, only tea. But the real dealbreaker was when she had to make some phone calls to speak to individuals about the various presentations she had committed to do. It was clear that whoever was operating the switchboard simply pulled the plug and ended her calls whenever they thought she had been talking long enough. She finally gave me the go-ahead to get us out of there.
At this point, I was thinking I’m not sure if we can escape. How do you find another hotel in China if you can’t read or speak Mandarin? Will they give me some suggestions at the front desk… unlikely. If we simply hail a taxi, will they be able to figure out a decent hotel to take us to? I was fairly certain that the hotel management wouldn’t want us to go.
Fortunately, even though there was no Internet, there was a phonebook in the room. So, I sat down and leafed through it page by page hoping for a sign of something useful. And low and behold after many pages I came up with a small ad for a Holiday Inn. I managed to use the terrible phone system to call the hotel to book a room and get the address… they spoke English… hallelujah!
We loaded our stuff and headed downstairs. I recall being worried that they would not call a taxi for us and attempt to make us stay for the several days we had booked. In the end, the woman at the front desk begrudgingly called a taxi and we escaped!
I must tell you we went quite literally from the outhouse to the penthouse. I don’t have a picture of the room we stayed in at the Holiday Inn but I do have a few pictures of the outside and inside of the building. They even upgraded us to a business-class room with a desktop computer connected to the Internet. I believe I am recalling this correctly in that we were paying around C$40 a night for the Bates Motel and The Holiday Inn only cost us about C$90 a night.
The shocking Beijing hotel nightmare had ended!!!!!! Here are the photos of where we ended up!
I think I’ll wrap up this tale with a few more upbeat photos from our Beijing stay. First, a few photos of the Love-goddess hard at work lecturing to a couple of different groups. In the first, she is just about to lecture to a class of Mah’s students at Beijing University. I love this photo because two students have just walked in late, and Mah is signaling them to come up and sit in the front row… Their punishment for being late apparently.
Secondly, she is meeting with the various department heads at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Beijing… Teachers you can have fun figuring out the related children’s book title – followed by a scene from the actual lecture. The two young women in the one photo were students of Mah who acted as our translators.
Finally, a few gratuitous travel images from our stay. Perhaps to prove that we were actually there.
I should also point out that this was our experience in 2002 – things have probably changed a lot in China since then. And everyone we met in Beijing treated us extremely well – we felt very welcome.
