Half of us were staying in a hotel and the others in a hostile. We set our plans for the next day and split to find our places for the night. Me, Annie, Ashley, Elise and Paige were the hotel chicks. I'll be honest Elise is the only person that gave me hope of finding our place. She can read maps and find places like I can find chocolate. Seriously though. When in doubt, ask Elise. It's 10:30 at night and five american girls are roaming around the stinkin ghetttto of Paris. Ha no joke no one was around other than men on scooters and what not. Can you only imagine? Asking the least sketchy people we could find where this place was... obviously the first bad sign- no one knew where and better yet WHAT we were talking about. Finally we asked a cute couple that lead us in the direction. I was relieved!!! Until I started walking down the most ghetto street in Europe.
This is where it all began. All of us besides Ashley aren't vocalizing how awful the place looks. We walk into wide open doors, NO ONE other than the front desk dude was in there. I go up to check in and he hands me one key that said 205. I'll never forget it.. not to mention that the sticker was peeling off and was super dirty haha. He said "second floor." I took a deep breath and looked at no one and headed up the stairs. As we are trudging up the stairs all I could notice was the smell of smoke and how dirty it was. Disgusting and absolutely the least inviting hotel i've ever placed foot into. Anyways we walked in and I about died. STD's had to have been crawling everywhere. Oh, I realized that after we found the light five minutes later. All of a sudden Ashley throws herself on one of the beds (Annie and I looked at each other dying and she goes, "Maybe you shouldn't lay on that" hahha) and starts bawling. If you knew cute Ash it would only make this ten times better. The room had beds that were probably only 5' long. No joke. There were scratch marks on the wall, mold, nasty nasty blankets, wall paper peeling off the walls, the telephone didn't even work, the plumbing in the bathroom was on the outside of the walls, need I say more?
We started shutting all of the blinds, mind you that the windows didn't even lock. At this point you can only imagine! It was around 11 or 11:30 at night and we were physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. None of us were feeling too great about our situation. We decided to say a little prayer whether to know if we should stay or not for the night. As I began the prayer, I got to "Dear Heavenly Father..." and started sobbing hahahahh. I had lost it. This only brought tears and sighs to almost everyone else in the room. I finished and we thought it'd be best to get control of ourselves and then make a decision and to see how we felt. Paige, Annie and I started to call home. Annie gets ahold of Brenda and fills her in on the situation. Her Mom pulled up the hotel to see where we were and this is what she found:
“A PLACE FROM HORROR MOVIE”
Hotel de Hollande
ms-84 1 contribution
...st.petersburg
Jul 21, 2010
I booked this hotel via internet. On their website it looks small but clean and bright. I was really scared when I saw IT myself! It is one dark stinky hole in the wall! Everything is old and dirty! Floors and stairs are falling apart. Rooms (including superiors) are little closets with shortest beds I ever seen and with old yellow wall paper, that come off the walls, and with cracked ceilings, and with black mold in the bathrooms! On top of that everything is so dusty!
We didn't stay there. After we saw THAT we ran away. We found another hotel near there and it was nice.
Don't let Hotel De Hollande spoil your trip to most beautiful city in the world!!!
HAHAHHAHA. Later posts talking about bed bugs and such.
It was a joke. We were all dying after hearing what Brenda had to say about where we were. At this point we all looked at Elise-the only level headed girl in the room at this time- and she said, "I think it's a good idea to leave." I immediately called my Dad. He answers and I started sobbing once again! Hahaha. I told him the situation, he laughed and took care of his little princess(es) right away.
Next thing we knew we had reservations at the Marriott and were OUT of there. We had the front desk call a taxi-yes we had to walk down stairs for him to make the call because the phone didn't even work.
We grabbed all of our things and sprinted out into the taxi. No lie I started crying out of sheer happiness. Haaaa. It took us TWENTY minutes to get to our safe haven and we could not have been more pleased. The best line of the cab was from Ash, "Kinsey, I will be thanking your Dad in my prayers for eternity!" Too good.
We pulled up and almost started kissing the ground we were so happy. We literally ran inside checked in and flopped onto our beds. Ohhh man. Just as we were sitting enjoying our safe, comfy, beautiful hotel room, Paige walks in and goes, "Elise can't find her wallet." Just as we thought nothing else could go wrong. It was twelve and the final girl of our group had finally snapped. She had looked everywhere and came to the conclusion that she had left it in the taxi which in any big city means it is gone. The people at the front desk just kept saying "Wallet left in taxi? No good. No good. Cancel credit card!" Luckily she forgot that she had placed it in Annie's purse. We all hugged, laughed, and cried. The night had finally come to an end and we were safe and well.
I cannot explain the amount of chocolate that was consumed and the erratic emotions that took place that night. We officially had been awake for 24 hours. We were out in a flash-after our baths and showers of course- woke up in the same positions that we fell asleep in. We slept until 930, ate breakfast and we were off for another day in Pari'!
Just in case you were curious why we were going to stay there in the first place:
That's a funny joke because this is what I remember seeing:
Deceiving right? Gotta love the tiger blanket!
No comments:
Post a Comment