Ian Bennett I Thought Bubbles
Art and Videos and Travel and Fun from Ian Bennett
The hotel room, designed to make you feel at home, or rather, like you aren’t somewhere many many miles away. Sometimes I’d rather not stay in a hotel room. I’d rather get out and see the streets and the people and be woken up by that chicken or garbage truck or loud music that comes at around six in the morning.
Other times I’d rather hole myself up in that well equipped space, and just let my mind decompress. It’s really about what the head needs: more input, or less.
Foreign places are some of the most inspiring, intriguing, interesting, and all those other i_____ing words out there. A world full of new distractions that works on all of the senses. Walking down the street to get a bite to eat can be an adventure.
Yet sometimes the head can get too full and it just needs to take, well, a mental dump. Free from distractions and newness, where the temperature is always the same and so too, the artwork on the wall is always horrible.
All of this multiplies when traveling with someone, and the threshold becomes higher to venture out into the true unknown if you both aren’t up for anything.
For a long while I didn’t want to stay in any hotel because, well, how drab. But sometimes that’s what the head needs, even more than the body (although the whole regulated temperature and nice big bed provided their own reliefs which put the mind at ease in their own way).
This hotel was provided by a host, undoubtedly one of the best hotels in the city (signaled with one of the highest and most neon-illuminated signs in the city). So thank you to that host; the Chinese people I’ve met are some of the most hospitable I’ve ever met.
Although I must add, one difference about Chinese hotels? Most have the added “feature” of a KTV on one of the floors. Then again, I try to stay as far away as possible from all the forms of KTV, so maybe that’s a strike against hotels.
Tags: china, hospitality, hotel, hotels, mental dump, travel