Post-Soviet Bloc Luxury

With all of my mouthing off about trendy hotels, there are times when I appreciate the little luxuries most hotels provide, trendy or not. This week was one of those times.

I was already grouchy on Wednesday because my travel plans had me on a plane to Prague during the start of the Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea. Luckily, the schedule called for the plane to land with just enough time for me to get to the hotel and catch the last part of the match on TV. This, of course assumed everything went to plan.

Surprisingly things progressed nicely. The plane landed spot on time and I breezed through immigration (no checked bags) to a waiting cab (no queue). I experienced a minor hiccup when the driver got lost (turns out he had been driving a cab for only five days) and that ate up ten crucial minutes, but I arrived at the hotel with about twenty minutes remaining in the game.

Great, right? Not. I checked in and finally found my room after navigating a maze of corridors only to find a television with a screen the size of a postage stamp. I didn't even know they made TV's that size any more (or ever).

OK, plan B. I returned to the lobby to find the bar, which would surely show the match. The bar indeed did have the match on TV, but they had the same TV as I had in my room, only here it was twenty-five feet away and even more impossible to see.

OK, then, back to the room, where I sat and watched the last ten minutes on a wooden chair in front of the ten-inch screen (without sound, as the static proved to loud) - then thirty minutes of extra time followed by the agonising penalty shootout. The outcome just added insult to injury.

Prague is a beautiful city, but this particular hotel on it's outskirts left plenty to be desired. In what I am learning is typical Eastern Bloc fashion, they had decorated the public areas in the style of a tarted-up rest stop on the Ohio Turnpike. The rooms, while extraordinarily large, lacked the amenities one expects to find in modern big-city hotels like a shower, furniture, a mini-bar with more than four drinks in it, towels you cannot see through and a bed made of something softer than wooden planks.

I guess I shouldn't complain when the biggest problem in other hotels is a funky lamp or a white room. Serves me right!