Hotel Survival Guide (4)

This is the 4th episode of my hotel survivial guide. Actually, I was put into a very nice service apartment in Amstelveen during my stay in Netherlands. Many of my colleagues urge me to move to the party town, central Amsterdam. But I just see no benefit of doing so. I quite enjoy not partying, I read and spend long time sleeping after work. Amstelveen is a quite residential area, staying in the high floor, through the window, I can see the whole Amstel river area and the flatness of farmlands to miles.

This establishment has 300+ rooms and it is normally filled. The hotel management throw monthly party, through which I realise there are tons of consultants shipped from India for ABN AMRO, ING (We are going to talk about the inefficiency of bank IT project in the future). Another interesting thing is that many Korean or Japanese companies set up their European operation centers this area as well. I guess it has a lot to do with the easy-goingness of Dutch and Dutch tax law.

I had the agreement with the bank to have a 6 week 2 week roation if they would like to engage my service. Every time I check out of the apartment, I left some of my kitchen stuff, bicycle and rollerblades with them, await for my next return. So far it works out alright. The problem is that you don't really get the same flat every time returning to the service apartment. One day I came back from work exhausted, my mind was really occupied and I duly climbed up to the first floor and tried to unlock the door with my cardkey. Damn, it didn't work. I spent a couple seconds thinking what's wrong with my key then I realised, shit, I was moved to the 5th floor.

Similar thing happened before, I was checked into a nice hotel in Melbourne, after the super long flight (I think I was flying from Beijing, transiting via ShangHai, and the flight was delayed for 3 hours, the total travel time is about 20 hours). I was so tired and hungry, after dropping my bags I ran out to get foods. when I returned, I tried really really hard to think what's my room number. I remember the floor but not the room number. I didn't really want to spend any energy to get down to the front desk (also really embarrassed), I came up with a brilliant idea, I am going to try my key with every single door on the floor, ha, there were only 20+, I think I should be lucky enough to get it before half of them ran out.

I wasn't that lucky, also, I was afraid to be spot by other guests. I had to get down to the front desk, asking for my room number which they only gave me 30 minutes beforehand.