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Jess Ho
On travel

On travel

and doing the bare minimum.

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Jess Ho
Jan 18, 2023
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Like every other person with a streaming service, I watched The White Lotus. The major thing that frustrated me (as much as the characters, themselves) was seeing a group of privileged people in a luxury hotel in Sicily eat exclusively at the hotel breakfast buffet and the restaurant. Not a single one of them spoke Sicilian and they had the expectation of everyone around them to speak English.

It was so infuriating because it is accurate as shit.

I went to Korea over the holiday period and stayed in a fancy hotel. For me, this was special, but every other hotel guest acted as if they travelled like this every other week. When I checked in, the receptionist confirmed that I didn’t want to include the hotel breakfast buffet in my stay for an additional $75 a day. She was baffled when I declined the offer again, in person.

My reason behind saying no was that I didn’t fly for 14 hours to get to Korea just to eat shitty croissants, sausages, rubbery eggs and sugar bread from troughs when I could be wandering the streets for soup, pickles and rice.

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