The Baghdad Continental

Trip Start Nov 15, 2007

Trip End Jan 22, 2008

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Where I stayed

Patel Continental

(Delhi hotels)

Flag of India Delhi, India
Saturday, December 15, 2007

The training company had booked me into a local hotel called the Patel Continental. This was your typical mid-range Delhi hotel. That is to say it was noisy (like most of Delhi), room service, laundry and other services were a lottery (like most of Delhi), everybody lies to you all the time even when they don't need to (like most of Delhi) and the staff spent most of their time sitting around doing fuck-all (again, like most of Delhi). All quite interesting but not out of the ordinary.

That is until the day they decided to do something that if you'd seen it in Fawlty Towers, you'd have complained that it was too far-fetched and they should sack the script writer and I don't pay my license fee to watch this sort of rubbish, etc, etc.

To keep a short story short, we came back from class one day and found that workmen had started demolishing the front wall of the hotel

Our charming hotel

. The looks on the faces of Paulo and Mike (who had the front two rooms) when they saw the demolition would have made for a great photo (that is if I hadn't been pissing myself at the time - how many great comedy shots have been missed because the photographer wasn't in any state to take them?). To be fair to the hotel, they'd only just started removing the walls of their rooms when we arrived and there wasn't much brick and concrete dust on the lads' clothes, laptops and other stuff. The hotel manager did manage to look a bit surprised when they asked to change rooms though - I think he honestly thought that they wouldn't notice if he didn't say anything to them.

This meant doing exam revision to the beat of small men with big hammers pounding reinforced concrete continuously and arhythmically from around nine am until sundown. And leaving the hotel was fun. There was only one entrance to the building (fire regs - what are they?), which was of course at the front so the process was:
- Walk to the front door
- Wait for the guy sitting across the road to notice and shout at the workers
- Wait for them to notice him and stop hitting things
- Wait for any last bits of debris to finish falling
- Pray to whichever deity is in favour this week
- Climb through the gap between the rubble and the scaffold to the street (preferably while holding something protective over your head)
- Breathe out

After three days of this (and two exams) I started to get a little pissed off with it, particularly as rumours were building that they were going to start on the back wall of the hotel (i.e. my room). It was time to escape the madness.

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