Back in January when Katya and I woke up in our Nuremberg hotel room covered in bedbugs and baby cockroaches, my first thought was of all the excitingly hellish ways travel can still surprise. "A real fleabag hotel!" I told Katya (later). "Like Paris in the 30s!" But my second thought was of getting out of there quickly and my third was where in the city's darling old town I might be able to torch all my clothes in the middle of the night.
This was a few weeks after a bout of food poisoning had left me shakey and sweating on a bathroom floor in a different hotel, so it seemed a safe bet that, accommodation-wise, 2020 could only get better since it certainly couldn't get worse.
In fairness to the hotel, I should have been less surprised. The lobby, abandoned when we'd arrived, was decorated just so for some kind of half-hearted satanic dabbler's convention—dim red lights, a few dirty couches, an old, stuffed goat's head. Hanging on the walls, were—I think—current photographs of Nuremberg's top prostitutes of 1973, captured with all the softness of a refrigerator light at 3 a.m.
We waited twenty minutes (in which time we should have just left) before a huge man arrived, imposed himself behind the tiny front desk and silently handed me a key to our room—the very room from which we'd flee not 4 hours later!
By my count, those four hours add up to the shortest hotel stay of my life: booked for a night and in and out in half of one. By contrast, I've been in my Batumi apartment for over two months, twice as long as originally intended, and in Georgia since the middle of December (except for a week in Germany). In about a month, I will have spent more time in this little republic than in any country outside of the US and Japan. And while it's a lovely place, it not where I thought I'd be come May.
Brodsky said that "perhaps the best proof of the Almighty’s existence is that we never know when we are to die." But I don't even know when I'm going to check out of my Airbnb. Which, I guess, is a mystery I can live with. I'm not in a rush; I have everything I need. For better or worse, I could (and likely will) stay here until god knows when.