In preparation for meeting my European home exchangers I casually asked them which hotel they were using for the one night our home was unavailable at the start of their visit. Their answer seriously freaked me out. They had reserved a room at a homeless shelter.
A homeless shelter? A place where people with no housing sleep on cots in a big room? Let me explain. The swappers reserved their room through one of those websites that offers discounted hotel rates. The place they picked was half the price of the next cheapest option. This must have seemed like a great deal to the swappers.
The reason the "hotel" was so inexpensive is that it is actually not a hotel. It is a "Single Room Occupancy Transient Residence" which is a fancy way of saying "homeless shelter". The place they chose is notorious for illegally offering empty rooms as "hotel rooms" while charging city tax-payers for housing homeless people at sky-high rates.
I could sound altruistic by saying I was concerned about the swappers' safety among desperately poor transients. Or I could sound politically aware by expressing my concern that the "hotel" was displacing homeless people who really needed the rooms when ignorant Europeans were willing to pay cash for the same accommodations. But that wasn't what worried me.
If the swappers came to my home after staying in the homeless shelter I expected them to bring bedbugs with them.
In case you haven't heard, bedbugs are now a huge problem for travelers. Some of the noxious chemicals that killed the bedbugs have been banned. The wily bedbugs have adapted to other poisons. I don't know that the homeless shelter hotel had bedbugs, but I was not about to find out. It was time for some tough love with my swap partners....
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