Nightmare in central London.Hotel Apollo
The only plus of this, if I may say so, hotel is that it is located in the center, in the Bayswater area. As it turned out, London is dying out on December 25, there are no buses, even the subway does not work, so I had to walk around the city on foot. Very close to the hotel - Kensington Gardens and the palace, where Princess Diana lived. But the Bayswater district itself evokes some uncomfortable feeling, or something... Perhaps it was once inhabited by respectable families of the London bourgeoisie, as evidenced by the 19th century buildings - the famous London terraces with stables on the back side. But now Bayswater is more like a kind of Harlem, inhabited by everyone, but not by the British - Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Turks, Greeks, etc. They also keep shops with the appropriate set of rubbish and restaurants here. Hotel "Apollo" is declared as 2 *, but in comparison with the average European level of service, it can be assigned all Minus 2 * without too much modesty. We were saved only by the fact that most of the time we, of course, spent running around the city and excursions, and, excuse me, our refuge, we affectionately called the "dormitory". The hotel is maintained either by Indians or Pakistanis, with all the ensuing consequences such as skinning, dirt, etc. In the corner behind the door and under the table, we found clouds of dust at least a month old, and returning every evening, we vainly hoped that they had cleaned us today. No matter how! We managed to pass that dust untouched, like an honorary baton, to the next guests! The bathroom was also a pitiful sight: plumbing has long outlived its usefulness and began to rust, the mirror in the bathroom is no longer a mirror from constant moisture, there are traces of numerous floods on the ceiling. We were even lucky enough to be witnesses of such a flood, when one fine early morning we were shamelessly awakened by the attendant drumming on the door. It turns out that water was pouring from the ceiling in the lobby when someone was washing in the shower on the 3rd floor, and we were just between them on the 2nd. Do you think they apologized to us later for the flood or for waking us up? Fig. It’s good that the colored staff at least somehow babbled in English, at least at breakfast they could be told that I don’t need a toast, I just want coffee. (Here I remembered how on my last trip to the USA I often chatted with the hotel manager - a sweet elderly woman who told me so many interesting things about Texas, and about the town where we lived, and about herself! ). Perhaps from London, with its terrible high cost, you can’t expect super-apartments for a relatively small fee... but at least you need to clean your room at least sometimes! It seems that there is no sanitary inspection in London, otherwise the Apollo would have been closed long ago, and the owners would have been fined. In short, if you want to find a low-budget hotel in the center of London and have enough sense of humor not to count on elementary amenities and service - feel free to choose Apollo!
