Hotel rooms

  Every space has its own smell, a form of odour id. Upon entering somebody's home the person is tied with the aroma or stink of their personal space, and you recognise your presence in their small world only when you recognise the particular smell. Sometimes it's an indistinct smell of sweat, the stale air of a room shut down for too long combined with the heavy smell of burning sticks - regardless of their professed aroma they all smell the same.

  But it's a little bit to make you feel safe - you know a little bit more about them, you read behind everything, adding small characteristics here and there in their profile. It has substance and in time, you begin to occupy a certain space however temporarily.

  Perhaps that is why most people feel unnerved by hotel rooms - they either smell of nothing in particular, sterile walls surrounding a sterile space, or they smell of some cheap perfume that is a bit too strong for the nostrils but all hotels seem to favor. It might burn all other odours out. There is a constant reminder that not only are you a visitor but your presence will come and go unnoticed, there is no one to notice it anyway, there is no one to read here. Just you and yourself.

  I've always loved the state of limbo in a hotel room, you're neither here, nor there, you're anonimous, unimportant, unnoticed. For a while you get to be anyone, getting treated raki and tea by turkish waiters or sneaking around and talking with people you have just met. And then you disappear, as surely and decisively as that. There are no rules to bend, just invent them and break them. You get to dream and feel things that in a space that feels real you never do.

  You get to be yourself more than you get out in the so called real life.