Let's Not Meet Again

All I Wanted Was A Place To Sleep

This happened last year, in Taiyuan, China. My husband and I arrived by train around 2am, only to discover that the hotel room we'd booked had been given to someone else and we had nowhere to stay for the night. This was actually not the first time we'd found ourselves on the streets of China with nowhere to stay that winter, funnily enough, so we were a bit stressed but not freaking out. We found a cheap hotel online, planning to stay one night and find somewhere nicer the next day, and took a cab over.

It was hard to find, so when we got near, the driver called the hotel. A young guy in a tracksuit came out to the street to bring us up. He seemed pretty normal, if surprisingly energetic for 2am.

He took us into a run-down building through an alleyway entrance and we took the elevator up to the 9th floor. The hallways were unfinished, just bare concrete and exposed wiring. We're lead through a slight labyrinth of these halls till we get to the hotel.

It's one hallway of rooms, four in total. I was pretty on board with everything till we got into the room. Then I started getting a bad feeling. I thought I was just being prissy at first, because my primary problem was that there was no sink, just a bed, and a glass "room" with a squatter and a shower (normal at lower-end hotels in China, but I haven't been to one with no sink). Then I noticed there was a small window by the bed leading into the hallway, with no covering on it. Then, while the guy was harassing my husband to try and wrangle more than the agreed price out of him, I noticed there wasn't even a proper lock on the door.

I was really not feeling it at this point, and my gut was telling me we should go. My husband wanted to stay--remember, it's cold, it's 2am, we've been on a train all day, and we're fucking tired--but I insisted we leave. That's when it got really weird.

When we came in, there was no sign of another living soul in the building except us and the young guy. No other guests, no other employees. (The place didn't even seem to have a front desk.) But when we started walking down the hall, the tracksuited young guy followed us and started begging us to stay. Then, all of a sudden, about ten more people came out of NOWHERE, and they were all following us down the hall BEGGING us, some of them yelling and touching us, to stay.

I DON'T THINK SO.

So we left and spent the next hour and a half at a 24-hour KFC down the road and ended up spending three times the price for a soft bed and some peace of mind. Worth it.