holiday, part 4 (final)
Staying at one of the cheapest* hotels available in Singapore was never going to be a silken road of uninterrupted luxury.
After 4 days of quirky exclusivity at the Gallery Evason, Cheryl and I departed for an altogether more wallet-friendly hotel for the rest of our holiday. Alarm bells rang in our heads soon after we checked in, as the concierge said,
“I’ll get our maid to show you to the room”,
and a crusty old pensioner who was clearly this persons mother, hobbled out from the darkened room where they no doubt keep her, and silently walked with us to our room.
The room itself was very nice. Larger than our room at the Evason, and furnished in a kind of charming faux Ye Olde Britain stylee, it screamed ‘quaint’ what with its little curtains, comfy (looking) armchair and chain-operated bedside lamps. Irritatingly loud and obviously-in-need-of repair air-conditioner aside, we were both quite satisfied.
Throughout our stay, little reminders were offered now and again as to the fact that this was a small, family-run establishment. Money was requested for at regular intervals, as the normal hotel convention of paying at the end couldn’t apply in our // - us being a couple of suspicious young-uns who weren’t to be trusted. The dazed look of the night clerk became a familiar sight as we waltzed in long after midnight, his expression somewhere between “I have been up all day” and “these meddlesome kids, grumble grumble feck”.
So much was the fear of making a wrong move under the ever-watchful and almost paternally strict eyes of the hotel owners, that a massive personal crisis ensued when I broke the room’s light switch. I SWEAR I turned the thing off normally, but it just fell apart in my hands. 3 parts dropped to the floor of the pitch-black room (yes, I broke it after the light had actually been switched off), one of which was a mangled bit of plastic that in retrospect, obviously needed much more than the haphazard screwdriver and rubber gloves treatment I was thinking of pursuing at that time.
Sheepishly I presented their broken property to the front desk and said in my most dignified English accent (this is possibly my sole trump card in situations like this),
“I’m extremely sorry, but your light switch appears to have broken”
The lady at the desk took the bits of metal and wire and said she would get it fixed. In my mind I snorted “hah, and I suppose I can say goodbye to my 0 deposit too, but you wont be telling me that until I check out, right? RIGHT?” but refreshingly, no charge was incurred at all.
The Sloane Court Hotel. I would definitely stay there again - lovely rooms, very reasonable rates, and once you see past their iron-gauntlet wariness, a surprisingly homey atmosphere is there to be enjoyed. Most importantly however, you can break their stuff and they wont make you pay.
*actually, there were cheaper places to stay, but since these were either of the communal bathroom variety, or the ‘we let out rooms by the hour, too’ variety, we opted for Sloane Court.
That’s enough of my holiday. From now I will be returning to the originally scheduled programme of my Japan-related ‘hilarious’ fish-out-of-water antics.
now entitled Rilke sonic commencements dialogue nastily?Wotan