Some Cool Stories About Our Life

1. Sometimes we go to the IHOP near our hotel. It's the first restaurant we visited when we got back to the States, 'cause it was in the middle of the night and 'cause we'd eaten there before, like three years ago when we first were stationed here. The other night, I wanted to go there. We got in the car and started looking for it. It's three minutes away from our hotel and also never where I expect it to be, and we didn't see it, so I just figured we drove past it. I turned on the GPS and we turned around and it said "Arriving at destination on right." BUT THERE WAS NOTHING THERE! except some dirt in a parking lot. I commented, "Wouldn't it be crazy if it got torn down," and then we ate at Denny's instead, and saw a cockroach, and then I researched that IHOP and found out that it had been torn down and we'd eaten there in its last week. CRAZY.

(the newspaper's picture)

2. When we went to the hotel's front desk for our weekly Thursday week-renewal on the room, the price was lower than usual. "The price is lower than usual," I said to the receptionist. "So it is," she said. "I wonder why." It turns out that we're no longer being charged a hotel tax because this is now considered to be our place of residence. LOLLLLLLLL

3. I feel like the greatest right now because I'm taking three classes to become a licensed Realtor and investor. Joe's on night shift, so I'm awake all night, which makes things complicateder. The week starts on Tuesday mornings with salesperson training at 8:30 (which is like 9:30 PM to me.) I have to leave for that at 8, half an hour after Joe gets back from work. I get home at noon (or "1 AM,") and sleep a few hours until I have to get ready for pre-licensing class that evening. I drive Joe to work (he has to be there at 6 PM) and I go to school (I have to be there at 6 PM.) After school, I drive home at 9:30 PM and watch Flip or Flop on HGTV! Then take a nap, because in eleven hours I have salesperson training again. After that, I get home at "1 AM" and finally get some sleep. That night, I do homework and the week's first session of online Real Estate Investing class (which is only like 30 minutes of reading.) After that Tues-morning-Tues-night-Weds-morning set, things are easier because I don't have class again until Thursday night. Friday is my second weekly session of online REI class. Saturday Sunday Monday, relax, sleep, homework.

This is the first time I've ever felt like I'm "doing something with my life."

4. Between the hours of 4 AM and 7 AM, all HGTV plays is infomercials for anti-aging creme. The Krispy Kreme near us closes at the stupidly early hour of 11 PM. And the McDonald's next to our house hotel shuts down its icecream machine every night for cleaning from the hours of, like, 2 AM to 6 AM. It's the worst. I guess. Last time I was over there at 3 AM, a guy asked if I had a place where he could sleep. I went back to the room and used all the locks.

5. We've been buying gallon bottles of water because who wants to drink gross warm chlorine city tap water? Not us. (Even though most bottled water is city tap water - it's "from a municipal source.") Since I grew up in a rural area, I prefer the taste of nice cool fresh water straight from the ground, that still has minerals and sand floating around in it. So I've been trying to find the brand that makes water (hehe) with the least "municipal" flavor. Nestle Pure Life water is the best I've found. Crystal Purified Drinking Water tastes like inflatable pool toys. (Joe just buys whatever's cheap and squirts MiO flavoring in it.)

6. I wanted Japanese food. We went to a Japanese restaurant. It was going to be fun. We were seated and ordered our drinks, one Coke and one Diet Coke. Joe saw our waiter, who was on his way to our table, take a sip out of Joe's glass (I assume the waiter forgot which one was Diet.) We left and ate at Red Lobster instead.

WOW! Those were some pretty cool stories!

The Love Hotel

Love hotels are places, mostly in Asia, where people go to have sex. Often, entrances to these places are discreet, and you don't even have to interact with the front-desk staff; you select the room you want from a bunch of pictures on a wall, push a button, pay a machine (hourly stay or nightly stay), and your key is dispensed. Some rooms have themes, like the Hello Kitty bondage room, or maybe a castle theme, stuff like that.

Love hotels are often associated with Japan, and since we were going to Japan for a week, I thought it would be an interesting cultural experience - and funny - if I booked a room at a love hotel for us. I decided not to, though, because that would be disgusting and weird.

And then I accidentally did.

The day before we left, I found out that there was a mixup with reservations, and we needed a room for one night. I found a place online in the right price range without paying too much attention to the details. There were a few pictures, it looked fine. Anyway, we'd be leaving in the morning - what's the worst that could happen?

This?

Our taxi driver had trouble finding the hotel. When we finally got there, we were already kind of confused and upset, because either we'd just paid $100 for a 30-minute taxi ride or the airport money exchange service hadn't given us the correct amount of money. (We had just paid $100 for a 30-minute taxi ride.) And apparently the taxi driver had dropped us off at the back door of the hotel?

We went in. The lobby was a tiny room with a low ceiling. There was a display case on our right full of lingerie and what appeared to be a wide selection of lubricants, and, on our left, no one at the front desk. We called out a few times, and a heavy girl in her teens who looked like she needed a shower came out to help us. "Check in?" I said, and gave her my receipt printout from Expedia. She smiled and nodded and pointed to a sign on the desk asking whether we'd be paying by cash or credit. I pointed to the paper, where it said something about how we'd already paid. I don't think she was used to getting Expedia reservations, she couldn't read English, and since our phone didn't work in Japan, I couldn't really do anything. She got out her phone and typed into a translator, "Payment method?" I shook my head and said, "We paid online." She didn't understand. I smiled apologetically and held out my hand for her phone, so I could type in, "We already paid online," and pointed at the paper again. She smiled and held up a finger for "one minute" and made a phone call. While she was on the phone, I looked at the products in the display case and inspected the wall with the glowing pictures and buttons. A couple had just come in and quickly selected a room, gotten a key from somewhere, and left in the elevator.

Considering the display case, the room-selection wall, and the "back door," we had begun to become suspicious that we were in a love hotel.

She hung up, typed, "I understand," and gave us our key. We stuffed ourselves into the extremely small elevator and went upstairs. The hallway looked clean, like something from a normal hotel. When we got to the room, we - or I, anyway - were still stressed over not knowing if we'd gotten the right amount of money from the airport, about having no access to the internet to figure that out, and about having apparently actually reserved a room for us in a love hotel, so I was completely not in the mood to be excited by the features of our room instead of just really grossed out.

The room had a little foyer with a safe. Beyond the foyer was the sitting room, with a steep, narrow-stepped staircase leading to the bedroom. That was cool; we'd never stayed in a room with two floors before. The staircase was decorated with some pictures and a fake window.

The living room, which somewhere had speakers playing a soft, relaxing, repetitive tune of like ten notes, featured a change machine, a slot machine, a lingerie & lubricant vending machine, and a karaoke machine. And a glued-down statue of a cockatoo.

Attached to the sitting room was a vanity area with a sink and mirror. Beyond that was a small, warm room with a toilet in it. (The room, it turned out, was warm because it had been heated by the toilet seat; the seat had a console full of buttons to control the two different types of sprays and the heat. A warm toilet seat feels like someone was sitting there for an hour before it was your turn. For some reason, heated seats are really common in Japan.) There was another room off the vanity area containing a shower, a big jetted tub, a small television, and a decorative shop window thing with a weird display of Christmas tree lights and fake roses. At the flip of a switch, the room would go from normal lighting to a blue overhead with lighting on the fake rose display. So romantic.

Also in the bathroom was a scary thing on the wall, controlled by a dial near the lightswitches, that made steam.

And this sign illustrating how to operate a shower attachment which appeared to no longer be in there.

And this vaguely creepy bathing seat which I think is supposed to accommodate testicles.

Upstairs, in our bedroom, was another TV with another karaoke machine. There were two remote controls; one allowed you to control the projector installed above the bed which projected whatever was on the TV onto the wall across from the bed. At the head of the bed there was a control panel with numbered buttons. Each button represented a different lighting scheme for our lodgings, both upstairs and downstairs. Near the control panel was a "personal massager" which was plugged in somewhere, some complimentary condoms, tissues, the phone, normal hotel room stuff. Attached to the ceiling of the room was a color-changing LED disco ball thing.

I would have a picture of the projector in action, but about six of the ten channels on the TV were...not...good...for me to take pictures of and put on here.

Oh, the outside:

And the hotel-logo boards in the parking lot you to use cover your license plate so no one knows it's you:

So, that was the love hotel. My accident with the reservations led to one of the most bizarre experiences we've had yet. And once I calmed down and got over the impulse to disinfect the room - it actually looked as clean as most places we've stayed, and a lot cleaner than some - we made the best of it!

Wallpaper on the Ceilings

Our four-star on-post hotel, the Dragon Hill Lodge, ran out of room on what was to be our second-to-last day in Seoul, and we had to find a new place off-post. They gave me a list of nearby hotels with contact information, and I called around until I found a place with vacancies. At $120 per night, it was the fourth-cheapest place on the list.

Joe was at work, so I packed our two suitcases, two Army duffel bags, two backpacks, and two laptop cases and then packed a taxi with all of it. I couldn't communicate with the Korean taxi driver very well, but I told him I needed to go to the Crown Hotel. He pulled away from the Dragon Hill Lodge (in the rain, because it's rained every day since my arrival) and off we went. And then we drove out of the gates of the Army post.

I was alone in a country where I didn't know the language or customs or anything. I was nervous. As we passed Korean road signs, I was wondering if we were going the right direction, and wondering how long we should drive before I should just jump out of the moving vehicle and escape from this guy who was probably kidnapping me so he could sell me on the black market.

But we pulled up to the Crown Hotel and I got out and dragged all my stuff out and paid the guy and was not kidnapped.

A Korean bellhop whose cheeks were puffed out like he was holding his breath helped me get my stuff to the room after I paid for the night. He had to unlock the room's door after I struggled with the antiquated plastic punched-hole keycard for a few seconds.

It wasn't a name-brand place - not a Sheraton, a Marriott, not even a Best Western or Ramada - but the Crown Hotel looked nice from the outside. The lobby looked nice, too. But the rest of it...

Oh, sure, the picture makes it look cute and quaint. But it wasn't. The hallways, carpeted in dirty uneven holey carpet, were dark enough to make you look at the ceiling to figure out why all the light bulbs were burnt out. It was hot in the room, hot enough to wake me up twice, because there wasn't an AC/heating unit in there, just a vent on the wall. The ceiling had been wallpapered and was lumpy. The room smelled like it had been smoked in every day for the past 400 years. The hallways smelled like acetone fingernail polish remover.

The pictures don't show the weird inch-high change in elevation between the room and the bathroom, or the weird six-inch-high change in elevation between the room and the closet, or the crack in the thigh-high bathtub with the showerhead that had been added long after the hotel had been built with just a bathtub, or the disturbing garish shades of pastel green and peach paint detailing the furniture.

Also not pictured: on the wall over the bed was a dial which read SPEED: HI MED LO OFF. I turned the dial and nothing happened. I'm pretty sure the bed used to vibrate.

The bed felt like it was made out of cardboard, but I didn't really care because the sheets, at least, were clean. There was that. The sheets were clean.

The elevator was probably the smallest I'd ever been in. It advertised massage services.

Apparently, leaning on the elevator's door could result in you falling down the elevator shaft. (Probably not, but that's what the picture looks like, isn't it? And that's creepy.)

The hotel had Korean power outlets and zero American power outlets. Oh, and there were only two power outlets in the tiny room, probably because there weren't as many electrical appliances 400 years ago when the hotel was built.

Maybe I'm being horrible. There were no bugs, and I guess except for the carpets and the smell, the place was clean. It was just another case (as with the day I first walked into my apartment) of not-what-I-was-expecting.

But if there's one thing I'm picky about (and there are actually a lot more things that I'm picky about,) it's hotel rooms.

Anyway, the next night, we had to stay in a hotel again. I was more careful when making the reservation. This one was a Best Western.

I learned that the thigh-high bathtub thing is normal. Also, tiny elevators are normal. And it's normal for there to be an elevation between the bathroom and the room.

But there's really nothing normal about having a speed dial installed on the wall over the bed.