I've been putting off booking accommodation for Hive Creator Days for weeks now. So coming home after another yoga training, I figured now's the time. I guess you could say it was my inner organizational tyrant taking advantage of my airy side's exhaustion. I have a mixed relationship with finding a place to stay. I dislike anything that looks too mainstream, too impersonal, you know? I hate it, scrolling through listings on Airbnb and getting confused - didn't I just see this place? And you scroll back a bit, and no, it was a different one, but it looked just the same.
I get it. I've furnished apartments before for renting, and I know. You want to get the most amount of return on the least investment, obviously, which is why a lot of Airbnb and rentals tend to share the same cheap Ikea furniture and so on. But I also think it's slightly more than that. Like I've encountered in my travels the same cheap, low-quality Ikea coffee table in both apartments I can't now remember and places with quite a bit of charm to them, so.
I like staying in Airbnbs more than hotels because it often lets me know something of people's personality. Or their past. Ideally both, because even when it's a place furnished specifically for renting purposes, you can usually tell the creative people apart from the non-creative ones. The ones who want to do something for beauty's sake vs the ones who just want the blasted thing over with. There'll always be a flourish or a nice touch, or a cute, but not kitsch decoration on a mantle somewhere.
It's a way of getting to know people without actually getting to know them.
Best of all is staying in people's old houses. And that's not just because they're of higher quality, which they typically are (we obviously furnish a house better when it's for us or for our kids than when it's for some strangers in town for a couple of days), but because they're still in ways there.
They're all over the place and you're sort of living with ghosts, but without the sadness.
So I try to look for those. The places with a past. A feeling.
Waves ruined my old phone while living there, so I have very few photos of this place. And yes, it was Christmas. I like bizarre decorations, but I think I'd draw the line at the Christmas Tree up in May or something.
In Spain, little studio where the owner had lived as a younger woman. Her parents lived just above inside this wonderful side-street villa, and now so did she with her kid. I mean, they were fantastic in every way, always feeding me or down to talk. Wonderful. But the place itself was lovely too, it showed her own unique taste, that she was this lovely young thing with a love for light and who found a way to carve out space in a fairly small studio. From the bedroom, there was this great big door, a couple of stone steps up and it was now used as storage, but she told me she'd used it as a walk-in closet when she was my age, and it was just lovely, to imagine it. Even though she'd moved on, there was still so much of her there, and what a privilege to experience that.
Loads of places like that come to mind. In Chisinau (capital of Moldova), two years ago, we stayed inside a sort of guesthouse next to someone's home, and it was just wonderful because the son was this really cool rocker dude who did woodwork, so the yard was filled with stuff he built, like decorations and birdhouses and all sorts of weird, gorgeous contraptions.
I also really like places where the owner is near in this way. Not directly there, but you know, living on the same property or so. Traveling as a young woman often alone, it's been a great comfort, knowing you weren't coming alone to a dubious old place.
By far my favorite place with a personality was in Lisbon. It was this wonderful old house inside the attic of an old building in the center. It was just fantastic - and frightening, too, since they'd left the old man next door in charge and it was coming up an old creaky staircase at night, in from the rain, hearing this raspy old voice beckoning us from the dark. But the apartment was wonderful. I mean just look at it. Any place that's got a library (a real, proper one, not plane reads left behind by former tenants) wins my heart by default. But it was so rich with personality. We spent the entire week wondering back and forth about the lives of the people who once inhabited it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, we're all so real and the places where we live tell such stories of us. Why try to scrub them out and exchange them for bleak, dime-a-dozen conformity? I think often about renting out my own flat if and when I decide to leave here. I could never scrub away the quirks and style that give it its personality. And why? Just so it doesn't stick out amid the other same-looking listings? Seems insane to me.
And besides, it tells you something about the prospective tenant too. I eventually found a great-looking place which was obviously someone's home. It's not Ikea-looking at all, and I love it. I texted the owner asking if it'd be alright to stay and saying how I loved the fucking Star Wars blanket, you know? And I know something about him and he now knows something about me.
And so we go on in life.
Really hoping it doesn't turn into a murdery Bates Motel kinda situation, 'cause then this post would look pretty fucking stupid in retrospect, wouldn't it?
Hoping this is an okay Worldmappin post, since it's not the traditional picture/travel thing. It felt appropriate, but I have been known to be tone-deaf in the past. If so, apologies.