skitchin.net - The Sketchy Hotel

A little while back, I stayed in a hotel near Corning, NY. It was called the Best Western Lodge on the Green. I'm not sure what made it a 'Lodge' or why they specified 'on the Green', but they subtitled it, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, I booked it through Travelocity for $45 per night, so I didn't exactly have high hopes for it. It was cheap, and I expected it to be. Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't going to be a bash the sketchy hotel party. The room they gave me (#35) was actually quite nice. It had two big windows looking out into a grassy field/courtyard type place with trees and birds and whatnot. It was clean, it was spacious, it was your typical hotel room. The grass all around it was well mowed, the flower/shrub gardens were obviously cared for, and the pool (yes, there was an outdoor pool) apart from being heated was very well kept. The only real negative aspect of my hotel experience there was that the girl working the front desk when I checked in was annoying. She looked like she was about 15 and she had the attitude to go with it, along with a nasty Rochester accent and she didn't change the inflection in her voice when she talked, so you couldn't tell what was a statement and what was a question.

But I digress.... All I'm trying to do is make it very clear that I wasn't unhappy with the hotel. I would stay there again without hesitation, and I would reccomend it to others traveling in that area. By now you're probably wondering 'Ok, so why is this page titled The Sketchy Hotel, and why should I keep reading?' And you would be right in wondering that, so I'll tell you. I had checked in, threw my junk around the room, opened the curtains, windows, and was flopped on the bed when I noticed something. I was looking out the window at the building across the quad (courtyard, if you will. My school calls the grassy area in the middle of campus the quad, so I'll probably use both terms interchangably due to habit) when I realized that it was also part of the hotel. I thought 'wow, this place is pretty big' then dismissed the thought. I needed to buy some batteries and a few other little things, so I decided to walk to the Wal-Mart that was on the other side of the hotel and across the massive parking lot. So I left, and cut across the grounds to explore a little. That's when my bedside realization returned in full force. This place was big, and it had a strange aura about it.

When I was searching for pictures to use in my quartet's Shostakovich concert, I took a virtual tour of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. The most striking aspect of it was that it was in color. Think back at the pictures you've seen, Schindler's List, war footage, etc. They're all black and white. To see it in color makes it that much more real. The people there who were being tortured and killed saw everything in color, much like you would see your back yard. There were trees, gravel paths between buildings, grass, and electric barbed wire fences. If you didn't know about all of the terrible things that happened there, it could mistake it for a college campus, or summer camp type place. They called them work camps, and rightfully so. It was unsettlingly pleasant. Take a look at the virtual tour for yourself, or read the journal of an equally surprised visitor and you'll see what I mean.

Sorry about that. I said all that to explain what I meant by 'strange aura', and it got a little more serious than I'd intended, but how can you deal with something as tragic as the Holocaust with flippancy? Anyway, walking around the grounds (which from that point on I thought of as 'the compound') reminded me of the Auschwitz virtual tour. Yes, the hotel had a concentration camp atmosphere. Long low brick buildings, an institutional color scheme and architecture, and it just kept going. I counted 7 buildings of rooms - 3 of which were 2 floors tall. The highest room number I noticed was 114, but they might have gone higher. (side note: a quick check on their website says 135) This is a combination of 5 pictures that I stitched together into one panoramic shot, standing in the middle of the quad behind my room. Or, if you have broadband, click here to download one of those quicktime movie things that lets you look around and zoom in. It's 15.8 mb.