Little book of travel

When it comes to language, I must admit to being a lazy traveller. At school I was too busy causing mischief to pay attention in my language classes — and as a result my German skills are woeful. I never thought that this would be a problem until I had to travel to Germany for work. But as I walked through the arrivals terminal in Munich I realised that I could not even recall the basics — I couldn’t count to ten, could barely say hello, and had no hope of ordering food anywhere that could not cope with my demented hand gestures.

This did not appear to be a problem … after all, I was travelling with colleagues. Moreover, one had spent many years living in Germany and was fluent and the other could at least understand German even if he was reluctant to speak it. The three of us would arrive and depart together … casually building up a rapport with the hotel staff, chatting, joking about the weather, talking about beer and the best local gardens. But there was one small problem.

You see, we had all been staying in a very modest hotel. It reminded me of a Flag Inn from my 70s childhood. The decor of my room was brown and orange. Not chocolate. But brown. As in mud. The wallpaper, a lighter shade of brown, was infused with decades of exhaled cigarette smoke, which in the dull glow of the bedside lamp, seemed to wheeze in its own emphysemic way. And each morning I would wake feeling like I had been smoking for a week — the skin at the back of my throat stinging and raw — and stagger into the bathroom for a glass of cold, soothing water. Despite being tiled from floor to ceiling with tiles (70s brown of course), the bathroom also stank. But this was not a problem. Inconvenient, sure. Creepy, undoubtedly. The issue was that all of our rooms were missing an item that is indispensable to the business traveller — an iron.

Each morning on the way out to meetings we would all ask at the front desk whether an iron had become available. And each time we would get the same response. Nein. Each afternoon on our return we would again, check in at the front desk. Jane decided to try in German. Nein. Later, I tried in English. Nein. The one word that I knew — and I didn’t want to hear it. There was, however, an iron available in the laundry.

The next morning around 6am I set off to find the laundry. I had a slightly crushed shirt in one hand and my BlackBerry in the other. I was aiming to iron and catch up with my team in Sydney at the same time. Really, they didn’t need to know what I was wearing (which honestly was not much). To my horror I found the laundry in the basement, along a dimly lit corridor. Large, hospital style double doors opened out into a forbidding, grey brick room. Pale natural light fell through the open brick air vents through which I could see cars in the car park and an icy draught whistled across the room and out through the doors. All I wanted was to press my shirt and get back to the stinky bathroom for a shower.

Day after day, I engaged in this strange, uncomfortable ritual. The first week went by and I fell into the second. Still no iron.

On the Tuesday I headed up to Frankfurt (more to come on that leg of the journey) where I stayed at a funky, new, boutique hotel. It was top shelf. The soap bathroom was uber sleek. The beds comfortable. The decor, stylish. I wondered whether they would notice a missing iron. But like all good things … two days later I was checking in, again, to Stinky Motel. This time, I didn’t even bother asking. I signed in, looked up, and before he could say anything, I said it for him. Nein.