Vacation Horror Story

The Gardenia was, not much to our surprise, a beige building atop a beige slab of limestone carved into a beige grand staircase with little square beige windows in tight little rows that would be beige if rows could be beige. It seemed as if the unorganized chaos so typical of Malta was only lacking in the color department, whose uniform color of blandness entirely washed the land in sights easy on the eyes.

The Maltese community had inhaled the famous color lacking color: The land was beige, dusty and rolling; the shrubs were beige, cracked and withered from the scorching climate; the faces were beige, leathery and wise; and the architecture was beige, Moroccan-style and seeming as if stacked to the skies. The Gardenia was no exception.

Before I had ever stepped tanned foot onto the Gardenia's steps, however, I spent my first fanfare week living in Malta sleeping in a stark beige room in a loft above one of the crammed apartments lining the dusty streets. I stayed with a resolute yet gentle woman named Angel, whose lovely beige Mediterranean house was filled with religious paraphernalia and that familiar musty feeling that many lives have passed through the untouched rooms. Each morning, the kitchen table was neatly topped with crunchy breads, olives, capers, sliced hams, tuna, and tomatoes for me to enjoy as I awoke, and Angel, waiting and tanned to permanence with long, stretched wrinkles outlining her weathered but wise expressions, dined with me each day over beige cereal and beige biscuits.

Nevertheless, after a week spent sleeping soundly in an old wicker bed, I left Angel's house, survived by only an Italian bottle of merlot and a sincere note of gratitude. It was time for living arrangement number two.

Katerina, my new colleague and roommate, had arrived from the Czech Republic just short of a week after me. Together, we placed my memories in suitcases and zipped up the streets of St. Julian's, moving forth to Swieqi, the neighborhood home of the Gardenia hostel. And though I knew plenty of stories about hostels, neither one of us could have ever properly prepared ourselves for this one.

As we lugged our bags up the sandy steps, there was, it seemed, something funny in my nostrils about the place-like the feeling one gets when the weather is turning sour or premonition is creeping in. The feeling bubbled up as we rattled, jiggled, jimmied, and jangled the doorknob in futile attempts to crack open the door from the frame. It seemed as though this key was not made for this lock. We knocked, knocked, and knocked.

Very much to our surprise, a startled and totally naked French girl flung open the door with wine running down her chin and a bottle swinging around in her right hand at the cue of our knocking. She slurred something and flopped back down on her bed in the adjacent room. Katerina and I exchanged glances of uncertainty, pausing momentarily before we continued inside; I, in my bold American way, stepped in first, taking a full breath of the Gardenia in its aspiring glory. I searched the foyer and drew a mental picture of my new apartment, wondering how it was that I ever arrived there.

Even more to our surprise, it was then that I noticed a slight flaw in the beige color scheme of Malta: for politely positioned right beneath the horizontal light switch, in the middle of the beige wall, was a streak of crimson blood. Not a splotch, not remnants from a bleeding finger, but a streak, painted down the wall as if striped by a hand. Fingerprints touched the tips of the bloodstain, furthering our proof that this was indeed the remains of some human. We both started screaming hysterically, as little girls in all cultures do.

Katerina threw down her straw hat and an enormous cockroach scuttled across the floor and planted himself in the warm brim. We carefully kicked the hat out of the room and left the cockroach to leave as he saw fit. The naked French girl walked back out of her room guzzling a bottle of wine during the fiasco.

The next morning, we awoke to two suitcases literally engulfed in cockroaches, with hoards of them crawling in and out of our unfortunately unzipped bags. Imagine our horror to find our most precious possessions the home to an extended family of cockroaches, my most feared of all creatures on our lovely planet Earth.

And so it was that we embraced our new dormitory.

We handled the yellowed sheets scattered with holes and cigarette burns fairly well, considering the circumstances and the cockroaches. We handled the yellowed and crusty excretions on the bedsheets with uptight dignity, holding our hands over our mouths and removing the sheets from the flat mattresses. We handled the towels on the ground with uneasy poise, pulling them from the wad on the floor to find them drenched in wet chocolate smears and someone's disgusting nose-blows caked with creamy snot. We discovered that there was a mile-high pile-up of human excrement in the toilet, that it wouldn't flush, that the lamps had no bulbs, that there wasn't any toilet paper, that the shower had no curtain, and that there were half-empty bottles of local beer tossed around the room. We couldn't shower, we couldn't use the bathroom, and we couldn't sleep. Late that first night, as I walked around with insomnia at my side, I stepped on a cigarette butt and stumbled back into the hall where my eyes rested on the blood stained down the wall and the sounds of the naked French girl moaning in the next room and the Russian girl next girl dancing to the blaring beat of a techno song.

There was an odor my naïve nose had never experienced reeking from the kitchen, and only after my exploration, I discovered the root of the smell: inside the freezer sat a rotting birthday cake covered in mold and cockroaches. Apparantly, among the other mishaps, the freezer wasn't freezing anything in this particular flat either.

There was a peculiar cat outside my window who serenaded us morning through night with incessant meows, despite our shooing and stuffing the cracks in the windows with the dirty bedsheets. And though I adored felines, the meow was too persistent and creepy to even come close to adoration, with the voice thin and shattered like its owner's matted coat and emaciated frame.

Two days later, there was still the problem of fitting the key properly into the lock each time we returned home despite our pleas for a new key, and, to ice the cake that appeared to have been living in the refrigerator for something close to two years, I realized that I had picked up a terrible earache. My right ear suddenly lost all feeling, all sound, and all perception, and I would have been unable to take a shower had I been able to take a shower in the first place. The tap in the sink spewed the water all over the walls, and the water held a slightly beige color of its own, so I reasoned that I wasn't missing much of a shower anyway. So, in desperation, Katerina and I dipped our bodies into the chlorine-filled swimming pool in the hopes to free ourselves of our recently overactive sweat glands.

After three insufferable days, Katerina decided, quite obviously, that the Gardenia was an unacceptable place to house two new foreign employees. This, of course, was a given fact; however, when we went to discuss this with our boss, he seemed to think that this matter was on the list of priorities up there with installing video cameras in the girl's bathrooms and getting our work permits processed. As our boss was outrageously gay and not concerned with our salaries, this also wasn't a main concern.

Our three days spent in the Gardenia were interminable, lagging like an afternoon whose sun is too stubborn to set. Our temporary roommates, Valérie from France and Julienne from Russia, entertained us with their butchered version of English and their morning antics-Valérie with her casual way of meandering around unclothed, Julienne with her blasting techno tunes, wine bottle, floating dance, and talks about her underwear and plans to become an architect. The poor girl had lived in the Gardenia for nine months as well, which was pretty entertaining in some respects. As far as Katerina and I were concerned, we survived our three days by staying as far from our room as we possibly could, dreaming about how we certainly hoped to be greeted with flowers and not by somebody's bloody salutation next time.

And only after we both burst into tears in front of everyone in the office at the European Center for English Studies, our boss finally agreed to get us out of hell.

That afternoon, as the taxi driver skidded to a stop to whisk us away to somewhere unknown, we remembered to snap a photo of the Gardenia. For how would this place seem like anything but a flaw in a dream sequence had we not practically documented it? We giggled to ourselves like lifelong friends as we hauled our suitcases, now stuffed and disheveled from the numerous pack-unpack-pack escapades, onto the rack in the back of the taxi.