It was a strange hotel. A very strange hotel. Sort of a bad dream, one where you'd never be able to leave and instead would spend your entire life trying to.
We were shown to our hotels (the "very good" single rooms), and Gollum motioned the eating gesture.
“Breakfast?” we enquired.
“Yes”, he replied, “Breakfast.”
We resorted to counting on our fingers to suggest 9am. Lots of confused counting by Gollum - not a case of struggling with English, rather a case of struggling with numbers. After 10 minutes of standing in the corridor, trying to explain we wanted breakfast at 9am, he let us in our three rooms and we presumed he had finally understood.
How very wrong I was.
5 minutes later at 2am, after quickly climbing into bed and fast falling into a deep sleep, there was a knock at the door. Straight back up, to my room door, I opened it, and there stood Gollum.
"Hello, what's up?" I enquired, hiding my slight frustration as he had tried to be helpful (even if it was just for a few Tenge).
"Breakfast at 6?" he asked.
What?
"No, breakfast at NINE" I said, holding up 9 extended fingers.
"Now, I sleep" showing the universal sleep gesture, two hands against the side of your head. I think he understood. He nodded, said goodbye, and left. Once again, I undressed and got into the rock hard bed, a small feature in the strangest room I’ve ever been in; looking like a Soviet living room from the 50s, complete with two armchairs and the worst furniture you'd ever seen, everything a horrible shade of green or brown (walls/ceiling/floor included).
Knock knock.
I jumped out of bed, opened the door and kept as nice as possible. Gollum was back, this time with Tweedle Dum. I asked again what I could do for him - this time, it was to ask whether we liked their city of Pavlodar. Unbelievable - I almost told them I’d like the city much more if they let me sleep, but I made some excuse about it being too dark and we'd look at it tomorrow. Tonight though, 2.20am, I wanted to SLEEP. They left me to it, back to the hard bed I went, this time drifting off nicely.
Knock knock.
I couldn't believe it. No guesses to who was at the door yet again - Gollum. I opened the door and looked at him.
“You want breakfast NOW?" he enquired.
Unbelievable. How can any one man, be it speaking any language or any age, not understand that we were very simply explaining to him that we wanted breakfast at 9am? Not 6am, not 7am, just 9am. How can any one man then think we wanted breakfast at 2.35am? I didn't find out till the next morning that Will & Mackey, both asleep in their equally shocking bed, were both wide awake and laughing their heads off, the paper thin walls muting nothing. Gollum eventually left, for the last time that night. I think the look upon my face explained everything; in particular we weren't after breakfast at 2.35am.
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