Traditional resorts are still enormously better than Airbnb where you are practically taken hostage until you complete a series of bizarre and dimeaning quests before being able to leave. One of the worst quests I’ve had to complete was to emerge from an apartment in Madrid, lock the door, crawl into a strange little space behind lines of drying laundry, and throw the key back into the apartment through a small window so that it would land in a spot that the instructions described in a long-winded and pompous way. You only got one chance at landing the key correctly since you couldn’t get back into the apartment and redo the exercise.
At the same (very pricey and extraordinarily well-appointed) apartment in Madrid, there was a dishwasher that gave me a neurosis. Every use of the dishwasher would short-circuit the stove, necessitating the owner to come and lie under the stove for an hour with a hairdryer in his hand to dry it out. This gave me paroxysms of guilt, especially since the owner tried to be an extremely good sport about it and tell me in detail how he absolutely didn’t mind spending his Saturday night under a stove.
“Why didn’t you stop using the dishwasher, then?” you’ll ask, thinking that by “using the dishwasher” I necessarily mean “turning it on to wash dishes.” But no, as I found in complete desperation, dripping a couple of water drops on it from the dishes one washed in the sink has the same nefarious effect, resulting in the elegantly dressed owner lying under the stove again with a cheerful explanation of how he didn’t mind spending both Saturday and Sunday drying appliances with a hairdryer.
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