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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“resorts are still enormously better than Airbnb”
I agree. There are times when an Airbnb might be worth it or the better option but over-production has led to crapification of the process.
I’ve stayed a few times at an Airbnb… type place in Bucharest (though it wasn’t called that at the time). The big advantage is that you relate to the city in a very different way than in a hotel and I liked that. But things worked and there wasn’t any series of tasks, the owner looked at it for a few seconds the first time and that was it (he also had his own cleaning staff). And after I was a known quantity then it was the same.
But in a smaller tourist oriented place… no… hell no. It’s nice to laze around, show up for meals and not worry about cooking or cleaning (while observing basic order and hygene of course).
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I guess that part of it was also that you were in Bucharest rather than in Western Europe π We tend to be chill and practical about stuff in a way that Westerners aren’t.
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“part of it was also that you were in Bucharest”
Less than a five minute walk away from where Ceasescu gave his last speech…. at first I thought it couldn’t be because it was so… neglected but the last time at least they had plaques up.
Weirdly there were hardly any stores in the neighborhood the first time, I went out in the morning looking for milk and eventually had to buy some from a coffee shop. They had kind of… stalls with water and snacks and alcohol but no milk…
I don’t know what most Romanians think of BucureΘti (see… I’m fancy!) but I really kind of love it. It’s mostly ugly and chaotic but there’s an energy there no other capital in the region has.
And I really doubt if anyone renting apartments in Poland would be so chill…
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Personally I prefer airbnb/booking style stuff precisely because in my area, you get a flexibility you don’t really get in hotels (I tend to arrive and leave at weird hours, so I can just tell the host that I’m going to get there at 2AM and leave at 5PM for example, and in Romania they’ll just let me know if that’s possible without paying an extra day)
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It might be different from country to country. In Spain,there was this one apartment where the owner wanted to open the door remotely for us, which was like a maddening game where we had to push the door at the exact moment he would send a signal but we couldn’t know what that moment was. With 3 suitcases, a child, and a long journey behind us, we were just about to lose our minds when the owner texted that he had sent us a wrong app and we had to install a different one.
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Hmmm, KId, your apprehension is not neurosis, but completely rational fear, even in Spain that cannot possibly have been code. Trump et al had better wake the hell up, there are sound reasons for not tolerating illegal aliens for construction.
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That’s a good point. And the same goes for agriculture. I got badly poisoned by lettuce from California last week. I thought this was not possible and I had to be losing my mind until I read up on the conditions in which it gets picked. That was eye-opening and scary.
Did you guys know that lettuce poisoning is actually very frequent?
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It’s why you’re not supposed to eat any raw vegetables when traveling in the 3rd world. We’re importing those conditions.
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conditions = endemic HepA and e. coli, sh*tting in the fields, and not bothering with handwashing.
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Yeah, I can remember my wife trying to explain to the kids that they could eat the raw vegetables and the fruit here, but all from the store had to be washed. They were confused/uncertain until the girl developed swollen lips, an allergic reaction from some store bought fruits.
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Yikes! I hadn’t even thought of allergy cross-contamination as a problem with that
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methylethyl
Nah, I am pretty sure that both she and her Mom are allergic to the waxes use to artificially polish commercial apples and pears.
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I didn’t even know! It honestly never occurred to me that this might be happening. And yes, exactly, it’s all part of third-worldization.
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Just wait’ll it starts being intestinal worms! Americans have no idea…
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I mean, I’ve had the typhoid vaccine but I understand it’s not very effective. So that’ll be exciting if it makes a comeback.
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