[Pictures taken from a hostel booking website]
We walked up to the counter to check-in and the man working quickly apologized and said that they did not have our reservation and that there were no rooms available. We all looked at each other, befuddled. What do we do now? We asked if there were any other rooms available and the front desk worker told us to wait for a moment as he went and retrieved what we assumed was a "higher up."
She was dressed in business attire and profusely apologized for the mix up. She told us to come sit in the bar area and offered us free drinks while she tried to remedy the situation. She said there was someone checking out at 10:30 and they would clean the room and have it ready for us. As we waited, a few of us pulled out iPhones/iPods to connect to the Wifi. As usual, the Wifi had a password and when we asked the front desk what the password was, they told us they didn't know. Seemed a bit fishy that they didn’t know much of anything…
The only other people sitting in the bar area were the business lady and two Muslim men. There were sitting at the next table over from us. I didn't pay much attention to them. I played cards with Michelle, Michelle, and Ed until our rooms were ready. Christopher paid a great deal of attention to the conversations that were taking place at the next table over. Here is an excerpt from his blog about this:
"So they would try and get rooms for us, we then sat at a table, for a while, waiting. While there, behind us was what I got the feeling was a mob guy, his muscle and they were talking to the owner, I decided to listen to the conversation….While I was waiting out in the stair well, I watched a woman walk up the stairs I just knew that she was caught in sex trade, I had been thinking more about it all and I realized we were at a brothel, not just that but I was thinking about the conversation that I had overheard, and realized it was about the sex trade, it was about either smuggling girls from there to Bangladesh or from Bangladesh to there, that I’m still not sure of but simply that we were in a sex trade and human slavery hot bed…"
Our rooms were finally ready [it seemed like a small miracle that they went from having no rooms available to having two rooms available for us]. Cathy, Ed, Christopher, and I took the room on the second floor while Erin, Michelle, and Michelle headed up one more flight of stairs to take other room. We quickly settled in to our room. It was nice, clean, and had a good amount of space. I thought to myself that I could definitely be comfortable here for two days.
As we were all climbing into our beds, we heard a knock at the door. It was Michelle Close coming down to ask us a question about what time we were waking up in the morning. She never did ask her question. When we opened the door, she was flabbergasted by how nice our room was. After seeing the whole room, including the bathroom, she told us that we were all going to come and sleep in this room. She told us all to go look at their room. We all climbed the stairs to take a look. When we walked in, it seemed like it was a completely different hotel. The walls were a dingy white, there was hair in the shower drain, and freshly used soap. Close put it this way: it looked like a room that prostitutes used to get ready before they went down to their clients in the downstairs rooms. [So that's why someone was "checking out" at 10:30pm].
So, we helped them bring their stuff down to our room and Ed went down to talk to the front desk. He came back and said the room two doors down from us was available, but it had a leaky air conditioner, so the floor might be a bit wet, they warned. We opened the door and our nostrils were filled with an aroma that was beyond musty. And the floor wasn't just wet, it was soaked! The boys offered to sleep in that room so us girls could sleep in the nice room. We didn’t mind sharing beds anyway.
As I got ready to climb into bed a second time, I thought that this hotel was not worth what we paying for it [the team had no idea, since we had kept it a secret that we had supporters back home paying for it]. Just as I laid down in bed, there was a knock at the door. This time, it was Ed asking to talk to me. So I wriggled out of my sleeping bag liner and met him in the hall.
He said that he didn't have a good feeling about this place and that we may not even want to spend the night here. He felt that our physical, spiritual, or emotional safety was going to be compromised if we stayed. So, we called a team meeting in our room and brought this concern to the team. We all decided to ATL (Ask the Lord) about what we should do.
The longer we waited, the more urgent the feeling. Almost everyone on the team voiced that they felt that we had to leave NOW (at 1:30am). Erin likened it to on of our training camp scenarios where we had to "get out of the blast zone." Cathy and Ed both got visions that were not the most uplifting. We asked one last thing before we packed up our bags. "Where do we go?" We all agreed that since Ed was the most keen to this feeling, he would be our discerning factor for the night. Christopher got a feeling that we should turn left out of the door to the hotel.
So, we packed our bags, headed downstairs, and left the building. We let Ed handle talking to the front desk; the rest of us just headed out the doors. We had no idea where we were going. And it was 1:30 in the morning. And I had read reviews that this wasn’t the greatest part of town. But still, we were listening and the Lord was leading. There is no where safer than in the hands of God.
At every intersection, we asked God which way to go. Ed was the discerning factor, so he led on. We stopped at a hostel down the street: no rooms. Michelle Kwak got the color green, so we walked toward a row of green lights. We stopped at a hotel around the corner: rooms, but we didn't quite feel at peace. We walked on. I kept getting the word "Marriott." I didn’t know if this meant find a Marriott, or to use my credit card or what. I passed the message on to Ed, it didn't mean anything to him. So we kept it in our back pocket.
We came to another hotel: The Elegant Inn. This was actually the other hotel we were considering when we were booking our reservations on line. It was all God that we ended up there. The first wave of comfort came in the familiarity of the name. It was a beautifully decorated lobby. We asked if they had rooms: yes! We asked if we could see the rooms before we committed, so Ed went to investigate the rooms. The second wave of comfort came when we saw a family walk in and take the elevator. Ed returned and said the rooms looked fine. So, we reconvened in the lobby, asked everyone's opinions and how they felt about it, and decided that this was where we were going to stay.
So at 2 in the morning, we checked into our rooms. Ed, Christopher, Cathy, and I took the quad room and Erin, Michelle, and Michelle took the triple. Even though it was late, we all met in the big room to debrief what just happened. Everyone shared their perspective of what happened at the other place, some things coming to light that some people were completely oblivious of. And then we spent some time praying for that place; for the prostitutes that go through there and are trapped in the industry; and for the people running the place.
And so our vacation began! Welcome back to KL!
[Here is a link to Christopher's blog if you want to read more from his prospective]
