Most of our guests have checked out after the busy weekend. Deborah has been busy cleaning rooms all day. (No, I haven’t helped her; she says she needs something to do). She has discovered that there are definitely scavenging opportunities for innkeepers. Guests, either through forgetfulness or a desire to lighten their load, leave all manner of things behind. Today Deborah scored four bottles of shampoo and conditioner. In previous days we’ve inherited bottles of beer, an air freshener, cartons of milk, cheese, bread, and a frozen food box of the traditional but oddly named “bubble and squeak” (a fried patty of mashed potatoes and chopped vegetables). We’ve also ended up with a cell phone charger, although this is of less use to us and Deborah has tried unsuccessfully to reunite it with its owner.
Deborah finds it interesting how much you can learn about people from tidying their rooms. In the rooms where the engineer types stay you’ll see laptops and newspapers. In the rooms of the worker dudes you find beer cans and pizza boxes and the occasional home-made bong. Some guests are neat and tidy, some are total slobs. Some even bring their favorite stuffed animal to sleep with.
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Deborah says each room holds the smell of its occupant and the variety of human scents is truly amazing. Men definitely smell different than women, but within each gender there is a vast array of individual odors. One of the more distinctive in this regard is one of the workers who frequently stays here in one the basement rooms and regularly leaves skid marks in the toilet. Deborah has dubbed him “The Pooper.” He makes no attempt to clean his own toilet despite the fact that every room is equipped with a toilet brush.
Speaking of toilets, that is exactly what they call them here – both the fixture and the room. We Americans pussyfoot around the subject with terms like bathroom, lavatory, powder room, ladies room and restroom. But on more than one occasion when we’ve been at a museum or in a train station Deborah has asked someone where to find the restroom and they, thinking she in her strange American accent must have said “restaurant”, proceeded to give her directions to the nearest eatery. No, you have to ask where the “toilet” is. This takes some getting used to as it sounds a bit crass to our ears, even though it is thoroughly truthful and to the point. On rare occasions you might also hear the friendly traditional English term “the loo,” which I quite like. Or, if you’d like to revert back to Aussie slang you can call it the "dunny" or the "thunderbox."
