Counting culture

In a little hotel room in a province. It is clean and simple, but not quite aligned with my sense of aesthetics. It looks a little a bit insubstantial, and shiny, as if everything is designed to be able to be hosed down. The lamp has a covering of plastic on it, like it was never quite unwrapped after purchase. The ‘free hotel bathroom stuff’ is also somehow creepy, 4 cotton buds in a transparent bag, some lotion in a sachet, all shoved in a small white plastic basket hanging from the wall. The information for the room has a lot of rules, in both English and Vietnamese. It contains itemized lists of what is in the hotel room (as if somehow you would try to leave with the television) and even the specific brands (as if you would come from home and try to upgrade your television by swapping with one in the rooms). It feels like a hotel made by people who are suspiscious of people who stay in hotels like this one, and made for people unaccustomed to staying away from home. Dour and authoritarian rather than welcoming and comfortable. One outstanding feature though, and for this I forgive all manner of apricot and forest green coloured curtains, is the bed. The bed is hard, really solid, with no lumps and bumps. It, I imagine, will be like sleeping on forgiving ground of some kind. Like an even swathe of moss covered dirt, somewhere shady, somewhere safe under a tree.

Do you see what I resort to, mapping idiosynchrosies to remind me that I have a cultural reference point and am not at sea, floating adrift in a world of shiny tiles, howling wind and beeping bikes.