HOTELS AND EVERYTHING PURE. Guest Post by Anike Alli-Hakeem (MoneyBender)

Recently, I have been yapping on and on about my latest desire to write about something I really love. To share my experiences, both awesome and bothersome.  I love Hotels. Okay that’s an understatement. I am crazy about hotels. The true proof of this is how often my close friends call me to rate an hotel they intend lodging in or to tell me about a new one that just opened up its doors to guests. I do not hesitate to give my impressions or to put down such hotels in my “to visit” or “ never to return”  list. The hustle of everyday life has not diminished my interests whatsoever. On the contrary, it has only served to fuel my search for new hotels as I recognize the need to take a break from time to time so as not to suffer a breakdown (it’s easy to get carried away with trying to be on top of your game work-wise that you forget another person will be given the job once you fall off the face of the earth) and to be adventurous and fun seeking in the process.

I love hotels for the many things they represent. For me, it means solitude and escape. It means being waited on. It is a peep into the world where your money can do many things for you. In my short young incredibly blessed years, I have worked on different  jobs and even though they are far apart, they have something in common. They always involve TRAVEL. I must confess, so long as a job has travel in it, I am more than willing to be on it. I love the experience of seeing new things and absorbing new environments, personalities and culture. For this reason, I have been opportuned to travel on work related matters and of course, travel always almost involves hotel stays. So be it work or leisure, just the thought of experiencing a new hotel or revisiting a really nice hotel gets me in the groove.  I have stayed in some really good and incredibly affordable ones and I have stayed in the nasty bed bugs infested ones. Those ones should not even be called hotels or their younger sisters, Motels. They were just damn right nasty, from the rooms to the service, NASTY. Anyway, that is a story for another day.

So it was on one of such “yapping sprees” that I was asked why I wanted to write about hotels and why I felt I could. My automatic response was “I love hotels and I have passed a night or many nights in so many of them”. And then the room went quiet! I was beginning to wonder if an angel was passing (like we fooled ourselves when we were children and a room suddenly went quiet before discourse almost automatically continued) when somebody said “what?! If I did not know you I would have taken that out of context. Why so many hotels?” and then I responded “It may be that I am on holiday in a new town or a different part of town but it’s mostly work that has given me such a wide variety of hotels” and the retort I got was “work? Hotels? Work!! Please don’t say that in unfamiliar gatherings, people may think otherwise”. I was going to reply but then, I took a beat and thought about it.

Our society is one that is majorly prejudiced and we like to see, do or hear something in a certain way or no way at all. Stating that I have visited so many hotels “because” of work may not correlate with  who or what certain people think you are or who they think you should be. I really do not understand why it is so weird to make such statements without being at risk of being  viewed as a “road-runner”. You have to look a certain way, dress a certain way, be a certain age and speak a certain way to be a certain person. This prejudice is so culture deep that getting out of it is a task on its own. Does staying or loving to stay in so many hotels mean you are not “pure”? or does it just mean that our prejudices usually come up before we actually spare a thought and realize that hotels are built for many reasons, part of which surely include making rooms available for travelers  and solitude seekers who need them.  

Please share your thoughts.

MB