Hotels I have known

While in Copenhagen recently, I stayed at this charming inn. I had to stay here for one night because the hotel I thought I had a reservation for, didn’t, and they were full up. They kindly found me a room here. It is located behind Copenhagen Central Station. Possibly the only hotel in Copenhagen in summer time with a vacancy?

I was careful not to include any snaps of some of the charming locals who were sitting around idly not far from the entrance.

The room was spartan. (This is what you get for 350 Danish krone – which translates to just under AUD$70. At least they didn’t charge an arm and a leg for it.)

If you look closely you can see a glass ashtray on the table. The room reeked of cigarettes. The cigarette stench was what I found hardest to cope with, actually.

In the end I put the ashtray in the closet. In my imagination it helped a little bit. I think what really helped was the fact that the window opened. It was such a nice warm day in Copenhagen – and a nice mild night – that I left it open all night.

This was the view from the window. It looked into a courtyard of a residential building. One of the neighbours had odd ideas though: someone decided to use a very loud drill (?) at around 11pm. I know the sun had just gone down, but still?

Everything was very shabby in the hotel, but it seemed clean enough. I stayed here for one night, and really I would probably have had a better time if a) I wasn’t still suffering from a bad cold, and b) I had managed to rein in my over-active imagination better. I was picturing bedbug infestations, muggings by some of the locals, infectious water-borne diseases (I will spare you views of the the communal bathroom), electrocution, etc. NB: None of the imagined horrors occurred.

The high-quality light fitting in my room.

Shabbiness aside, would you believe they provided complimentary wifi?? Speed-wise it worked quite well. This certainly helped me pass the time that evening, and made it a bit more bearable sitting in the smoky-smelling room.

On this last trip I stayed in five different hotels, with one night on board a ferry and one night on a train. Four out of the five hotels provided complimentary wifi, as did the ferry. (The hotel that didn’t, charged approximately $10 a day for wifi; the train had no network at all, complimentary or otherwise.)

To this day I have yet to stay in an Australian hotel that provides complimentary wifi.

According to this blog, there are ten things every luxury hotel room should provide, and complimentary wifi is one of them. (The others being power outlets by the bed, storage, towels, blackout curtains, robes, bottled water, no windows in the bathrooms (!), a safety deposit box, and a hairdryer.) The fleabag provided six out of the ten items, incidentally, and you couldn’t say it was luxurious…