Alias and I tried to be adventurous on our first evening after meeting up in Brussels last weekend, opting to walk to the Grand Place rather than take a cab or the metro. After all, the (very cute) lass behind the hotel reception desk assured us that it was easy to find: “Just follow the road from the square, and keep walking straight for twenty minutes.” “I hope we don’t get lost,” I replied, in a tone that – to those in the know – would have clearly implied the consequences I would have thought to be appropriate were we to do so. Alias barely suppressed a giggle.
Needless to say, thirty minutes later – in the by-now-quite-heavy-rain – we found ourselves being rescued by an ever-so-nice local, who confirmed that we were in entirely the wrong part of the city, and nowhere near our intended destination.
As you can imagine, I spent much of the rest of the time in the hotel contemplating the prospect of bending the young lady over my knee and teaching her a lesson about customer care… Or of complaining to the hotel manager. “I’m terribly sorry, sir: she’ll be soundly punished,” he would reply, before turning to her: “My office. Now!”
It’s still amusing to imagine the conversations the staff would have about us. The dynamic between the three of us must have been so hard to understand!
(and maybe, if the hotel manager heard his staff gossiping about us, he’d beat them for being so disrespectful?)
Yeah, I bet the hotel thought there was far *more* going on in certain regards than there actually was!!