Myself and a friend recently rented two single rooms in the ‘hotel’ Monopole, Amstel 60, Amsterdam, to the tune of \u20ac60 per night for four nights (\u20ac250 + city tax) on October 11th -14th.<\/p>\n
My heart sank when we got a look at the first room; a small, dank place with twin cots, dirty marks on one wall, a tatty thin carpet, old fixtures and fittings and a unpleasant view of what appeared to be an industrial building with a grimy roof.<\/p>\n
The second room three floors up a break- neck stairs into the attic, was similar to the first but icy cold and dull in the day time, with more dirty marks and a fist-sized hole in one wall. The single sheets which covered the matresses seemed clean but the dank duvets on top looked like they hadn’t been washed in several weeks; there was a dark brown cigarette burn hole in one. Having viewed the warm and inviting looking rooms on their website, my friend and I were quite upset about the arrangement. When I asked to be moved from the attic to another room, I was told that we had gotten a special offer and that ‘rooms in this part of Amsterdam generally go for \u20ac90 or more’.<\/p>\n
We had to lug our own bags to our rooms. That night we discovered that the club behind (ironically called ‘Escape’ – at this stage I wanted to) had little to no sound-proofing and that it went on until 4.30am (bar Mondays when it shut its doors at 2am). Strangely, the hotel Monopole makes no mention of this or the bar\/club right next door to them on their website.<\/p>\n
On the third evening when we arrived back at the hotel, we found our towels hadn’t been changed, or rooms\/ toilets cleaned or toilet rolls replaced. In fact the only thing touched and removed was the cups we had requested (much to their astonishment) the night before.<\/p>\n
Some kind of hammering and building was going on in one of the rooms for much of the time we were there (daytime only).<\/p>\n
My view of Amsterdam was sullied by the very poor accommodation and lax approach offered at the hotel Monopole. However, aside from the hotel, I did get to see beautiful Dutch architecture, ground-breaking painting, creative theater, layers of history and the wonderful buzz of such a diverse European city.<\/p>\n