I love to travel. I love the idea of going to a place I’ve never been before and trying to see all its highlights in only the few days you can afford to go there. I didn’t do a lot of traveling growing up, that is if you don’t count soccer tournaments in Pit Meadows and Ringette games in Lumby. I found out along the way that the more you travel the savvier you get; meaning those first few trips are pretty uninformed and down right expensive - I’ve walked right past the Newark Air Train sign and inadvertently paid a $90 cab ride into Manhattan. Plus tip.
We’ve all done it; we’ve booked ridiculously expensive flights only to find out the seat sale happened the next day. We’ve spent a week at a hotel that obviously borrowed its online photo from another country because the place you’re at totally sucks. We’ve been ripped off by cab drivers in foreign countries, snuck into the wrong bunk at a hostel, and we’ve definitely stayed in neighborhoods that sounded great on paper, but the peeled paint on the roof and rattrap in the corner said anything but “quaint and homely”.
Let me explain.
In an effort to both travel and decide where I wanted to study music after graduation, my boyfriend and I took a trip to New York for about 5 days. I was a year out of school, hadn’t really traveled except for school trips, and was completely amped on going to the Big Apple for the first time.
Now, we needed to do this on the cheap, and the fact that it was Christmas time made that almost impossible. We had a friend who had recently moved there and we had arranged our last night to stay with him. The first 3 nights we booked on something pretty similar to Craigslist. I mean people don’t lie about that kind of stuff, right? They list exactly what they’re offering, right? Broadway means right downtown next to all the theaters, right?
We paid $75 for the scariest cab ride of my life. We would have placed first at the Indie 500, and you would have thought we mistakenly jumped into a getaway car by the amount of weaving and squealing of tires taking place. We drove through the fashion district, we past through the theater district – I could see Times Square, this is amazing! We rounded the top of central park…hhmmm. Wait, that was Columbia University, (uuhhh this is gonna be a long walk to get a bagel in the morning). I see signs for Harlem. Um. I don’t think…Oh HELL NO! East Harlem!??!!
The cab stopped outside of our “Bed and Breakfast” that consisted of a 5 story run down apartment building with El Pablo’s Pawn shop/Chicken Eatery on the main floor. There was what I believed to be a homeless person standing out front who gave me such a creepy look as I approached the door that I actually felt stupid for not giving him money sooner. It wasn’t until I passed by him that I saw his nametag with “doorman” pinned to his shirt.
The front desk consisted of an elderly woman with a prerequisite of hacking into a dirty handkerchief before she told us that our suitcase would not fit in the elevator. How is that possible? Because the elevator was designed to hold a max capacity of 2 anorexic midgets. Once climbing 8 flights of stairs we arrived in a dimly lit hallway with a very strong remanence of an ethnic dinner and after meal digestive herb.
The room we rented was a shared apartment of two girls who rented their place out for extra money. Oh, but they still lived there. Our “bed” would be sleeping on their couch, and our “breakfast” was explained to us in a scribbled out note saying ‘eat anything you want in our fridge’. Should I have looked? Maybe not. Let’s just say I was testing to see if it could get any worse. Moldy meat and half eaten containers of cottage cheese danced before us in anticipation of our morning meal. Yummy.
I’m not proud of it folks. I wish I was stronger, but it happened. I cried. A lot. Tears of panic started streaming down my face, I looked around me in horror and imagined my death at the hand of a giant rat wearing an eye patch named Skeeter. My boyfriend tried to calm me down and say that we would be fine, but it was hard to hear his reassuring voice over the bumping beats coming from the apartment next door.
Trying to get a hold of myself I walked over to the window for some fresh air. I needed to take control here, I needed to grow up and learn to accept new experiences, I needed to…hold on, is that? Are they? Oh lord, I’m witnessing a drug deal beneath my window. Of course, of all the windows of all the apartments in East Harlem, it’s this one that these three dudes decide to do business under…(although in East Harlem, I think the chances might be pretty good). It’s not enough that this place sucks, that it smells like medicinal curry, that the doorman scared me into giving him money, that a rat named Skeeter is most likely going to make off with my luggage tonight!? THIS has to happen, this cliché!!!!
Then they saw me…watching them…I smiled, waved, and mouthed “hi” like a nice Canadian. They looked at each other, and then looked back at me. I picked up my bag and walked out of the apartment and got a $50 cab ride back downtown, then happily paid a criminally high price for a double bed in Tribeca. You can’t put a price on first time travel.
Moral of the story: look at a map before you book your next Bed and Breakfast.
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