If only I could find the Great Plains…

Warning: This post contains lots of complaining. If you don’t want to hear it, I suggest you skip this one.



Ohmigawd, what a craphole.

The dorm we are staying in (or rather, I have elected to stay in over a pricier hotel option) is connected to a music school. Currently, there is one violinist who appears not to have gone home for the summer.

I tried to think what worse bathrooms I’ve experienced. I’ve come up with individual examples – disgusting gas station bathrooms, rainforest bathrooms in Australia where bugs dropped from the ceilings – but I think these bathrooms win for overall effect.

The women’s bathrooms are down a long hall from my room. You enter a sort of foyer with three satellite rooms: a toilet room, a sink room, and a shower room. In the toilet room, there are four stalls – two are locked shut from the inside for unknown reasons, the third stall has nothing in it, and the last, filled with all manner of rotting and flaking pipes, has the toilet. Everything in here is cracked, mismatched or missing, except for a few tiles covered with splotches of paint, though what has been painted in here in the past few years, I cannot tell.

For anyone who has ever thought I spend too much time in the shower, here is your revenge. The shower curtain is a blue and white checkerboard pattern, with brown splotches. All over. No, it’s not someone rinsing out hair dye everyday over the course of a year, but instead, mold. I performed intricate choreography trying to get into the stream of water while not touching the shower curtain. It’s fun trying not to catch the plague while getting clean.

Because there’s no drainage in the floor and someone else flooded the room, I got dressed holding everything a few inches above the ground. A relaxing bathing experience.

Actually, that’s all on the second floor bathroom, while my room is on the third. I’ve gone down to the second because it’s the one with the western toilet(s). The bathroom on the third floor actually seems to be cleaner, so maybe I’ll start using this one, with its squatters (a stall with a hole in the ground). I mean, we were given a roll of toilet paper upon check in, so at least I know I’ll have paper whichever one I choose.

And at night, it’s all dark. Long dark hallways and no lights on. If you can find the lights, great. They will stay on for a minute. But you probably can’t find the light switch anyway.

Comparatively, my room is fine. The seven flies that came in here this morning from the open window have dwindled to one, who keeps flying in stupid circles near the (turned off) light in the middle of the room. But at least the flies keep out of the way – there is no avoiding the “mattress,” which maybe used to be a mattress, but is now a “mattress.” It’s like sleeping on a topographical map. The Mariana Trench is where the padding has completely disappeared and I hit the board underneath. Most of the time, it’s just a bright and airy basic room. Fine. Whatever.

And there’s no internet. Apparently music students don’t ever need to go online. (Though we’re told there is free wifi all around the city and in every café and at the language center.) I mean, why would one need internet at a school?

On the other hand, we are only paying $12 per night.