After my adventures round the West Bohemian Spa Triangle, I flew home from Prague but because trains can, occasionally, be a little unreliable, I wanted to be back in Prague on Sunday ready for my flight home on Monday evening, which would also give me a day to start exploring Prague, which is a city that it feels like I should have been to before now. Ergo I needed somewhere to stay on Sunday night and in a moment of madness, I ticked the “hot tub” box in my search. Maybe I just wasn’t quite ready to let go of the spa life. Anyway, I found something.
That “something” was a private room in a hostel. Not just any hostel, though – the Wellness Rooms Central is part hostel and part sauna. And… well, Prague doesn’t have a red light district, exactly, but if you’re looking for adult entertainment, this is exactly the street that’s recommended. I’d guessed something like that by the neighbours as I walked up from Wenceslas Square but it was the presence of a sauna club a few doors down that made this idiot question the Wellness Rooms for the first time.
I didn’t visit the sauna in the basement. Didn’t really have time and while I like a sauna as part of a spa experience, I don’t love them enough to seek out a freestanding one unless I’m in Finland, where there definitely isn’t the weird atmosphere hanging around the place that there is in this corner of Prague.
I came in, I checked in, I was given my key and directed upstairs where I found my room at the head of the stairs and with a big double door. My first impression was “Wow!” and then I looked more closely and realised that, other than the bath, I hate this room!
So, at first it’s a large room with grey marble-effect walls and black furniture. Actually quite “late 90s bachelor pad”-esque. There are LED strips around the ceiling so you can play with the lighting colour and there’s the famous bubble bath. It’s in the bedroom. It’s actually so close to the bed that if I tripped getting out, I’d crack my skull on the bed frame and the same rack is acting as bedside table and bathside table. I’d seen that online and thought it was a bit of an odd setup and now I was here, I got it. Oh, I got it. Please tell me your cleaners do a good job!
As for the rest of the room, I had a nice shiny sink and shower in the opposite corner, a toilet in a tiny room decorated incongruously in shades of peach and orange that definitely pre-dated the conversion of this room, a full-length mirror, a shiny chest of drawers and a double bed whose frame stuck out six inches beyond the mattress and therefore maimed my legs if I went anywhere near it.
What it didn’t have: a chair or any kind of desk or table to sit at; a proper bedside table; any sockets where I could charge my phone while also being able to reach it from the bed or even where I could put it down anywhere except the floor; curtains that even pretended to block out the view. The bath in the bedroom, already weird, starts to be a bit of a challenge when you realise you can see into the windows of the building across the narrow road even with the curtains closed.
To be fair to the lack of places to sit, there’s a communal kitchen with communal fridge, cooking equipment and tables right next door. There are dormitories here, as well as another private room which may also have a bath and the upstairs is an entire miniature private apartment. Something for everyone at the Wellness Rooms!
Except for people who want to sleep. It was over-hot – the West Bohemian Spa Triangle was forecast to 4-8⁰C that week but Prague didn’t get that memo. As in most hostels, there were people coming and going and yelling all night long and the bottle bins got emptied around 1am. Add to all that the fact that I’m a vampire who sees a single red standby LED on a TV as a searchlight and the light alone was always guaranteed to keep me awake that night. Not only was there an orange sodium streetlight right outside, I also had the uplit “Wellness Rooms – Check in Here” sign right outside. No, for a good night’s sleep, this place gets about minus a thousand out of ten. But then, it’s clearly not meant for sleeping.
What about the jacuzzi? Well, that was almost lovely, in its way.
I filled it from the showerhead attachment which made a hideous noise – just water on plastic bath bottom but still. I hadn’t realised at that point that noise consideration doesn’t exist here. Once the water was deep enough to submerge the shower head it was better and then I switched on the waterfall jet to finish filling. The water had two temperatures, obviously – scalding hot or freezing cold and you only had to turn the dial about half a degree to switch between the two. The light in the bottom only came on when the bath had its bubbles switched on but that was so loud that I only did it for two seconds. Consideration. Doesn’t exist. Use the bubbles!
Oh, and there’s that window. In an attempt to minimise anyone seeing in – although I was reasonably sure the windows opposite were empty – I switched off the main light and just used the LED mood lighting turned down as low as was practical, and this was the point where I discovered the lights come from under the bed as well as around the ceiling.
But still, I’m lying sprawled out in a nice big warm bath. The West Bohemian Spa Triangle is pretty short on hot tubs so I appreciated this, even if I wasn’t using it to its full potential. Nice bath, I only have to live with that shin-smashing bed for one night, it’s all fine. And it was. I have few ills that can’t be fixed, or at least forgotten for a while, by a nice bath.
But eventually I had to get out and that was when I discovered that it wouldn’t empty. I knew what I had to turn but it didn’t open the plughole and I couldn’t prise it up with my bare fingers. What do you do? I mean, living a bath full of tepid water that I’ve bathed in isn’t a particularly polite thing to do to housekeeping. Leaving an open container of warm water gently steaming in an already-hot room isn’t my idea of a good night. But filling a juice bottle from the bath and carrying it to the sink around 300 times isn’t either. You have no idea how much water a bath holds until you attempt to empty it manually with a one-litre bottle at midnight.
Overnight, it lost an inch or two of water by itself and in the morning I was back to trying to drain it myself. It had dawned on me during the long, hot, wakeful hours that I had a drybag with me which could probably transport more water in each run than a bottle. Needless to say, the floor ended up soaked, partly from the drips as I ran back and forth and partly because the drybag inundated the sink. Bath to drybag to shower, then. And be careful because the shower is more of a “wet corner” than a proper shower with tray and it’s very easy for a huge wave of water to flow back into the room.
Yeah, mistake all round. Should have found a boring chain hotel with a boring too-narrow too-shallow bath and a working drain instead of a dodgy room over a sauna club on a distinctly red-tinted street. No bath is worth any of that.
I Am A Polar Bear 