Sylvia's Journal

We always stay in the same hotel in Herat, a blue-glassed architectural-eyesore high rise that stands out in the neighborhood like a sore thumb. But the staff is nice and stable – each time I arrive here I see the same people and am greeted with more enthusiasm than the previous stay. We are practically old friends now.

The rooms are spacious and comfortable; now with the armoire I can actually hang my clothes. That the armoire is put right in front of the desk which has now become unusable is a minor irritation. It’s not that there weren’t any other places to put it and I try to imagine the reasoning that placed it in the most inconvenient spot.

The one thing that is a major irritation is the sheet arrangement. The bottom sheet of the bed is put on the mattress like a table cloth that is too small, it doesn’t cover the surface and edges of the mattress remain uncovered (who else slept on this I wondered). The sheet is more the size of a crib sheet than the full-size it should be. The rest of the bedding is do-it-yourself: a plastic bag on top of the bed has another sheet of the same size that therefore also cannot be tucked in. And finally there is the 15 kilo Chinese blanket that lies folded next to the plastic-wrapped top sheet at the foot of the bed.

Unlike the sheets, the blanket is made for a king size bed. It size and weight make it impossible to unfold with my one good arm as it is too heavy for my (still) injured and weak-muscled right arm. After trying for a while to spread the 15 kilo of dead weight over a slithering piece of cloth I gave up and slept in a jumble of mostly blanket and a little bit of sheet that’s always in the wrong place.

The label on the blanket says ‘handwash in warm water only’ and a stern warning to not dry clean. Given its dry weight I cannot imagine a human being hand washing this behemoth blanket (wringing not allowed luckily) and so I assume this blanket doesn’t get washed very much (this only bothers me the first night).

The pillow is another issue, a decorative affair with little things sewn around the edges that look like the ears on Halloween animal outfits. It too has only a sliver of a sheet wrapped around it by way of pillow case but ‘case’ is the wrong word as there is no encasing. Would they wash the decorative case after each use? I hate to ask because I can sort of predict the answer.

All of this is of course only a problem on the first night. After that I adapt and prove once more that we humans are, among many other things, endlessly adaptable and able to lower our standards if there are no obvious and immediate other options. It’s called accommodation, and probably a good thing.