Dec 30, 2017 08:27 AM
1279 Views
(Updated Dec 30, 2017 09:17 AM)
A nice place to learn about different kinds of mold. The hotel is more of a four roomed guest house, located in a busy market area within what appears to be an old building that has run out of shelf life. The joint is run by an English savvy manager, whose vociferous yet eloquent ripostes on tripadvisor should have sent out warning signals to me, but were ignored - my own folly.
The rooms were dirty, damp and moldy or in a nutshell -a BIOHAZARD. If not, then how do you call living in a mushroom farm, fun? The only two things good about the place are the availability of a DTH connected TV and a clean toilet bowl. Geyser and AC do not work. My asthmatic better half was coughing her way through the musky odour that filled the tiny room and reaching out for her inhaler every now and then during our stay there. We checked out the following day and did not stay for the second day that we booked there.
Take a look at our snaps through our ordeal in the joint and compare them with the nice ones on MMtrip which were used as bait. The other photos from a microscopic analysis of the species of mold found in the room, should interest not just biologists and microbiologists but also the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. One would have to traverse through more than a breathless three floors of antique British Raj staircase before arriving at the contemporary aesthetics of the joint's entrance that worked as a façade from prying eyes on the expiry date of the creaky building . I did not confront management throughout our stay as we seem to be in sleazy territory and since the mold growth was a rather conspicuous feature of the room that could not have been overlooked even by the least observant housekeeping staff or management, implies that it was deliberately meant to stay moldy because management didn’t care or that it was not checked for a month. The latter does not appear plausible because, the room door was open and the room well illuminated when we arrived, as if the room was prepared and waiting to be handed over to us.
The nice reviews by firangs on tripadvisor who stayed at Best Inn are suspect because either it was sarcasm or they were on weed or that the joint was in a better condition when they stayed there. Given the manager’s self-aggrandizement of how he entertained foreign guests well, means that the joint is firang friendly and why should they not be.
Nonetheless, rooms designed without a window should send alarm signals of where the corners are cut, and Kolkata generally has cutting corners more of a cultural thing. Its not frugality. Just short change the customer appears the business motto of the joint. To top it off, the hotel staff had the nerve to plead for tips while we descended the staircase to leave and coughing the mold out of our lungs.
Guest beware.
