Bed 21

The room was neon green, the kind of color that should have been banned centuries ago. Picture a worn-out Bangkok brothel in the 90s. It was filthy too. The room hadn’t been cleaned, with cigarette butts and empty beer bottles beside the bed. The sheets were stained with whatever body fluids the previous night’s guests had produced. The promised flat screen TVs weren’t there, there was no Wi-Fi, and the showers didn’t work, spraying water everywhere. There was no air conditioning either. Getting in was a whole ordeal. If you can find the place, first you have to wait for someone else who lives in the house to open the door. Then it’s seven floors up, where you call the number on the door and wait far too long in a hot stairwell for someone to appear. He introduced himself nicely and supposedly showed us how to use the air conditioning, showers, and Wi-Fi, but none of those things worked. An anonymous person who we think worked there handed over the keys, then asked us to go withdraw a shamefully large amount of cash. As soon as we paid, he vanished and didn’t come back. I’ve traveled to many places and can say this was the worst place I’ve ever paid to sleep in. The supposed Bed and Breakfast is called BB21, which probably means “disaster” in Italian. Without air conditioning, I’d guess the room reached a thousand degrees Celsius at night. I woke up sweating and afraid for my life, and the only option was to crawl out to the balcony for air and cooler wind after clearing away the trash and old building material left there. If you’re brave enough to use the dirty bathrooms, bring your own toilet paper, because there wasn’t any. They could give you a full encyclopedia of STDs.