A tale with too many hotels

(Editor’s note: Just for the record, while I was in Burma/Myanmar when I wrote this, I am now safely home. So if you have seen me at the bank or at the supermarket, you are not hallucinating. At least, I hope not.)
This hotel is too comfortable to be comfortable.
Not that the room is posh. It’s actually pretty basic: Bathroom with a tub and shower, king-sized bed but with no box springs, satellite TV limited to about a dozen weird channels.
But it’s nicer than I’ve come to expect on projects like this, and I find it a little unnerving.
Uncle Sam hasn’t gone crazy with my digs here. One of the problems is that there are a limited number of tolerable hotels, and for some reason — probably related to the upcoming election that has drawn me here as a trainer — there are a lot of us foreigners in town.
Just the same, it’s a nice hotel.
And I’m not used to nice hotels when doing gigs like this.
Often I have found myself in oddball sublet apartments. That was the case more than once in Moldova as well as in Georgia and Uzbekistan.
And when I’ve been put up at hotels, they haven’t exactly been 5-star.
In fact, they sometimes reminded me of the old joke about the guy who said he stayed in a 2-star hotel. He could see both of them through the hole in the roof.
In Kazakhstan, I found myself first in a place that seemed to have been constructed out of other people’s nightmares, then in the Hotel Cosmonaut in Karaganda, where the wiring for the KGB bugging devices was probably still in place.
In Moscow, I was bounced between two hotels, one with persistent hookers and one without.
In more remote Russian cities, the digs were a little less predictable. At one stop in the Urals, the newspaper asked a member of the staff to give up her apartment for the night because they were embarrassed by the local hotel.
Last year in Afghan-istan, my room was heated by a propane unit that pumped out nasty fumes and far more carbon monoxide than I’d like to think about. Fortunately, the room was so drafty I still had to sleep under half a dozen blankets.
But other stops were more congenial.
I’ve lived for a month at the Bass Hotel in Yerevan, Armenia. Two projects of two weeks each.
The Bass has something like a dozen rooms, so if you’re staying there that long you get to know folks.
During my second stay, I found myself watching videos of the hotel Christmas party with the staff. I was part of the family. It was great.
This time is different. The training is important, but somehow I think I’d be more up on my game if the hotel were a little more Spartan.
No hot water, maybe. That might help.
Then again, who wants to give up a hot shower?

[[In-content Ad]]