By the way, I had my camera nicked in Riga so there are no photographs from this trip to display. However I will be able to give a visual impression by way of scans of older guidebooks and photos from my last trip - the light during this jaunt was not good even for quite a powerful digital camera (OK, for a naff cheap Chinese piece of rubbish that cost me £15 in Superdrug - but losing my mother's nicer equipment would have been far, far more financially painful). Creativity springs from the imposition of restrictions, so this gives me more to work on to illustrate this trip than just hurried snaps, mostly blurred and probably under-exposed.

 

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It seemed to be a function of this trip that I found myself embarrassing myself - or my hosts - while travelling. Unlike the last times, I am not so sure what kind of reception I would get if I turned up back on the doorstep of the Hiie Maja (Tartu), Parnu's Hotel Carolina or the Litinterp guest-house in Klaipeda. The problem was not that I made a habit of trashing hotel rooms (although the Argonaut Hostel in Riga might have thought differently when they saw the bed which began to collapse out from under me in the middle of my only night there), but that the embarrassments will linger in both hotelier and guest's memories until the end of time. Ordering a taxi to come in the middle of the night and not bothering to wait for it, so that the charming guesthouse owner is woken by a horn honking and has to pay off a driver with no passenger at 6 in the morning, for instance.

 

Sometimes it wasn't my fault. I arrived in Klaipeda at 10pm and made it to the guesthouse half-an-hour later. It was in one of those quaint backstreets which has a couple of token pre-19th century chalets in amongst post-war Soviet destructionism. We were in Memel, the old German city which was attached to East Prussia and reincorporated into Hitler's Reich in 1939 after a turbulent twenty years as a semi-free city. The guesthouse preserved and augmented the building - most notably with a grim-looking metal door with no bell and no indication that it could be opened the right side of an artillery barrage.

At the windows above, two young women were giggling at an upper window. After ten minutes banging at the door, the girls upstairs started shutting the windows and drawing the blinds. It took another ten minutes to find someone with a mobile phone to call the number on the door. (A classic example of "the lights are on, but nobody's home".)

"Hallo?"

"Hello, can you come and let me in? I have a reservation."

"You want guesthouse Litinterp?"

"Yes, that's right."

"We work till seven."

"Well, I'm here now. I wasn't told about that, and I couldn't get a bus from Liepaja until 8 o'clock." 

I explained about the agency I'd used, and they were adamant the agency should have warned me that they didn't have a night porter and needed to let people know if they needed to call ahead and make sure they were aware I was coming later. However, since the agency didn't know that the hotel I'd gone to in Riga had not only moved, but was also shut, I really don't think it would have made much difference.

"OK, we come in 15 minutes. Please next time to tell us you will be here late."

Given that no opening times were listed for Sunday, I do believe this scene must be relatively frequent, particularly in the summer when the town is full of holidaymakers bound for the local Curonian Spit, a strip of sand dunes and quaint houses running down the Lithuanian coast towards the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast, a small "no-man's-land" exclave on the site of the old German Koenigsberg district, which was neither Polish nor Lithuanian nor permitted to remain German after the war. So the Russians took it. I'd like to go, but Russia still maintains strict visa controls at the borders despite it being now surrounded by EU/Schengen territory. The spit itself is half in Lithuania and half in Russia, and is a peaceful, beautiful national park, home to Thomas Mann among others while still a German possession during the 1920s. It puts Litinterp - a pleasant company which is primarily the Lithuanian tourist board but offers accommodation as well as information - at a disadvantage compared to more professionally run hotels and hostels.

When the receptionist finally turned up she must have been all of 16 - looking as if she was in receipt of the hotel as a birthday present - and in no way cognisant of the way a hostel in a major tourist resort should be run. I don't know who her friends were upstairs of the actual guesthouse. The room was nice, £20 a night and allegedly came with breakfast delivered to the room the next day, though given that I had inexcusably inconvenienced the foxy little receptionist in charge I thought that I could probably count myself out of that. Unusually for continental hotels that I've frequented, at least east of Vienna, there were tea and coffee making facilities in the room. I got my own back by using them and leaving coffee liberally spread over the pine furniture and upending the milk cartons on the sideboard. I had a nice hot shower and went to bed. The lack of breakfast was offset by a pancake restaurant at the other end of the street, and the girls let me leave my cases in the tourist office reception. "Remember we work till seven."

So of course when I got back at one o'clock for a bus at two, they were locking the place up again.

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The problem of course used to be in Eastern Europe (and in this country, if I'm being honest) that the concept of service was not understood. In the Soviet Union at least, this was because of absolute job security. The above would not have been atypical of 1978 Klaipeda (except that I wouldn't have been allowed to go there at all) rather than 2008. However, the girls serving me on this trip had no such excuse. Lack of exposure to western standards should not be a problem. I am also more sympathetic to bad service in Eastern Europe because I understand the difficulties the countries have faced in transition, and now face in the hordes of Britons who now descend for stag and hen weekends. Lithuania and the Baltic States, and Poland for that matter, are pretty good when it comes to modernisation of available accommodation, and I have even stayed in people's homes after being picked up on the streets of Bialystok and told the only hotels there are the business class establishments. Whatever, service standards can no longer be blamed on kafkaesque bureaucracy or lack of commercial ethics. This is not a diatribe aimed at a particular nationality; though both incidents happened in Lithuania, I find the Lithuanians the happiest and most liberated of the three peoples, compared to the gloomy and pedantic Latvians and the stoic and sombre Estonians.

Howwever, the problem was really that the staff at both hotels in Lithuania were on the young side, pert bubbly and absolutely hopeless. The Metropolis Hotel in Kaunas - formerly the Soviet Hotel Lietuva, and the ONLY place to stay in Kaunas' 1930s New Town - is right in the centre, opposite the now empty hulk of the old Merkurijus department store (equivalent to GUM in Moscow, and used in many Soviet propaganda films as allegedly the best-stocked shop in the entire USSR) and as commie-chic as you can get without being artificially kitsch. The pictures on the dining room wall hark back to 1988 alone. I will go back there, because they need the town centre revenue after much of the rest of the New Town fell victim to the credit crunch and the flight of most modern shops to the rather unfortunately named Iceland Square shopping centre. (Iceland was the first country to recognise the Baltic States' independence, so there is an Iceland Square in every town, just as there used to be a Lenin Square.)

The same staff arrogance followed me there. I left my key with reception when leaving the hotel for an afternoon's wander round the town. I followed a Russian tour party in through the massive oak revolving doors and asked for my key - which had disappeared. I spent a few moments unpacking my shoulder bag without believing I had put it in there - it was attached to something big and heavy enough either to be one of the breakfast rolls or to make sure that keys are not taken out into the city itself. Of course the receptionist, another teenage were-fox, took umbrage at this and brusquely told me that they would have to get the cleaners to unlock my room - but luckily at that moment, the Russian to whom she'd mistakenly given the key returned to the desk with it and put the error right.

We all make mistakes and I am no exception. In Were-Foxie's shoes I would have been utterly mortified, such that I wouldn't have been able to look the customer in the face again. This too would have been an over-reaction.

But this rude little girl did not even say sorry. I'll leave it to you to work out who's wrong and who's right, but in the service industry job performance should be measured in the way one deals with the public. I am not going to write to the hotel as I love it to bits and wouldn't want to suggest that Were-Foxie be turned out of doors to be inflicted on another unsuspecting guesthouse. But it is galling to see someone so obviously rude and incompetent filling a valuable and increasingly scarce paid position in one of my favourite hotels in the entire world.

And don't get me started about her equivalent in Reading's main Weatherspoons, who carded me when I attempted to buy a Pepsi under their draconian new Challenge 25 programme. Helloooooo - not all of us want to carry round our passports just to buy a drink in the pub when they are pushing 30.

Hopefully 2009 will be the year when common sense begins to prevail and pubs and hotels begin to make service and helpfulness to the paying consumer a priority.