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No, not that St Petersburg. The one in Florida.
It was January 2020, and I was on my last trip to the US before Covid confined us all to barracks. I’d been attending a conference in the St Pete Beach area and was enjoying a day of R&R before flying home. One minute I was striding along the road, heading for a highly recommended vegetarian restaurant. The next moment I was aware of, I was lying face down on the pavement, with a terrible pain in my head. ‘Are you all right?’ a voice asked. I looked up. It was a lady I’d just asked directions from. ‘No,’ I said. She was already on her phone, calling an ambulance. Fifteen minutes later I was being tended to by a couple of paramedics who were remarkably well-informed about – and supportive of – Scottish independence. (Or perhaps they were just humouring me.) They loaded me into their vehicle and delivered me to the Bayfront Hospital. Before I was given any treatment I was visited by an administrative person who took my personal details. She asked me about insurance. I said I had a policy through my university but didn’t have the details on me. No problem, seemingly. I was wheeled off for three head and neck scans and then had my bleeding wounds stuck together with surgical glue. After some time I was given the all clear and told I could go. In the meantime, I remembered that I had my insurance details on me after all. I asked the doctor where I should go to sort out payment. ‘No need,’ she said. ‘You’re good to go.’ I was surprised, but assumed the cost of the treatment was so low that it wasn’t worth the bother of invoicing me. Back at my Airbnb my American hosts howled with derision at the idea. I’d be getting a bill, they assured me. Sure enough, a few weeks later I got a bill for $2,000, which I thought reasonable, considering. Then, shortly after that, I got another bill - for $9,000! The first bill had only been for the ambulance service! And to crown it all, they hadn’t even noticed that I had broken a bone in my hand. Back home, and with my whole arm swollen and black and blue, I went to A&E where an x-ray revealed that I had a fractured 5th metacarpal. Thank goodness for the NHS. Last month I was in America again, attending a conference in Fort Lauderdale in Florida. After the conference I planned to spend a few days in Miami and booked three nights in an Airbnb in the Little Havana area. By now I’d managed to get an American sim card and an obliging young man at the university had sorted me out with Uber.
The Uber driver delivered me to the address, a detached, single-storey house rather like a Swiss chalet. The door stood slightly ajar. There was no bell so I knocked. No-one came. I shouted. I stuck my head in and shouted again, more loudly. Still nobody. I called the host on my mobile. There was only a recorded message saying that she wasn’t available to receive calls. I went in and prowled round the house. It felt like the Mary Celeste. It looked as if it was occupied – computers lying around, television plugged in, fridge full of food etc. There were even a couple of pots of cooked food on the cooker; clearly recently cooked as it hadn’t yet gone mouldy. There appeared to be two bedrooms, one of which was locked. I went into the other one which I recognised as being the one intended for guests as the bed was the same as the one shown on the Airbnb website. The bed had been slept in but not by someone who was expecting to return as the bedding was piled in a crumpled heap and there were no belongings in the cupboards. I was beginning to feel like Goldilocks. It was already dusk and getting dark inside the house but I couldn’t find a light switch anywhere. I groped round all the wall surfaces using my mobile phone as a torch until I found one. I tried repeatedly to phone the host, whose phone remained switched off. I wanted to go and ask the neighbours if they could throw any light on the situation but didn’t want to leave the house. I was afraid that if I closed the door the lock might spring into action and I’d find myself locked out. On the other hand I didn’t want to leave the door open as burglars might stop by and help themselves to my luggage. I swithered for a while. I could stay, go to bed in the used sheets, and hope that nothing terrible would happen during the night, or I could go to the neighbours. I really did not want to crawl under those crumpled sheets so I went across the road and was given a very warm welcome by a Cuban family. They didn’t know my host but had the phone number of her landlord. They called him and reported back to me with the news that she had gone off to Peru. He knew nothing further. So clearly my next step would be to contact Airbnb. Easier said than done. Like most online operators they make it almost impossible to contact them by phone. It all has to be done by online chat. But my new Cuban friends had a friend who was an Airbnb host and she was able to give us the contact number. This is where the story gets very boring because it involves four hours of increasing exasperation as I try to get them to shoulder responsibility and sort me out with an alternative GODDAM BED FOR THE NIGHT. Their first proposal was to offer me a selection of placements, with airbnb contributing $11.67 - ie,about £3 per night! - of any amount additional to what the original cost had been. Given that the accommodation now on offer cost about three times as much as the original cost this was sheer effrontery. Incensed, my new Cuban friend seized the phone from me and gave them an earful. Minutes later I got an online message from airbnb telling me that they'd upped their contribution to £200. So far so good - until I got to the place (ferried there by the Cuban lady) at midnight and discovered that the host spoke not a word of English and the accommodation was smaller than the average prison cell. That was how I saw it at the time anyway. The next day, when I was able to take a less jaundiced view, I discovered that the room – a tiny studio – was extremely well designed and top spec and its size didn't matter because it opened onto a large patio with palm trees and hammocks and cane sofas, and who needs to be inside when you’ve got the Florida weather and a space like that to lounge around in. And let's not be too critical. I hadn't been mugged, murdered or dragooned into the white slave trade, and for that I'm thankful. My first ever trip to the US and I was on my way to present a paper at a conference in Michigan: flight to Chicago, where I’d arranged airbnb accommodation for the night, then onward the next day by Greyhound bus to Kalamazoo.
My airbnb host, had given me directions on how to get in from the airport by subway. I didn’t give much thought to how I would get to his house from the subway station, assuming I would just be able to step into a taxi. I got out of the train and found myself to be the only person on the platform. There was an eerieness about the empty station. I walked out onto the street, expecting to see a taxi rank, or at least frequent taxis passing by. Not a taxi in sight, no pedestrians either, only private vehicles racing past as if the hounds of hell were on their heels. I went back into the station where one solitary figure was manning the ticket counter, chewing gum and reading a comic strip. ‘Can you tell me where I can get a taxi, please?’ He looked at me is if I was asking a stupid question. ‘Ain’t no taxis here, ma’am. You call Uber.’ Well, I couldn’t call Uber because I didn’t have a functioning mobile. I’d planned to get a local sim card but hadn’t seen anywhere I could do this at the airport. I asked him if he could tell me how to get to the address I was looking for. He had no idea. I walked out into the street again. Still no people. No shops, no restaurants. I’d looked up the address on an online map before I left home but hadn’t printed a copy of it as I’d been so sure that I wouldn’t need one. How wrong I was. I’d no idea even which direction to take. Then, way off in the distance, I saw a gigantic M flashing yellow in the skyline – Macdonald’s. I headed off towards it. Surely I’d be able to pick up a taxi there. The empty sidewalks exuded the same spooky atmosphere as the subway station. I felt as if I was walking through a ghost town, and the Macdonald’s sign didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. I came to a couple of vagrants sitting on a bench, drinking. They greeted me merrily so I took it that they would be open to conversation. ‘Can you tell me where I can get a taxi, please?’ ‘Ain’t no taxis here, ma’am. You ask the police.’ They pointed to a vehicle which I’d noticed prowling along as if driven by a kerb crawler. I went over and flagged it down. A policeman rolled down the window and looked at me suspiciously. ‘What you doing hereabouts, ma’am?’ ‘I’m looking for my airbnb accommodation.’ I told him the address. He gave his companion in the passenger seat a look which I couldn’t read but which seemed loaded with meaning, then jerked his head towards the back seat. ‘Get in. We’ll take you.’ Once I was in the vehicle both policeman lectured me sternly about the stupidity of walking alone, or walking at all, in that area after dark. I was puzzled. ‘But what’s wrong with the area? Those look like nice houses. ‘Nice houses, ma’am. But not nice people.’ It was, I discovered, a neighbourhood notorious for gang warfare and gun violence. As a little old lady walking alone with a suitcase on wheels, a laptop and a handbag full of dollars I would have been an easy target. We arrived at my destination and I got out of the vehicle with the police still shouting warnings after me. I walked up the garden path and rang the doorbell. No-one came. There wasn’t a sound from inside. There were no lights on. Perhaps I’d made a mistake about the address. I was afraid to look back towards the street in case the police car was no longer there. I rang the bell again. Still no sign of life from inside. So I had to look round. To my relief the police were still there. I went back and explained to them that although I had a mobile number for the host I couldn’t call him as my own phone didn’t work in the US. They took the number and called it. My host answered. It turned out that the door bell didn’t work and he lived down in the basement. I went back up the garden path. The door opened and I went in, feeling now that I could be entering something resembling the scenario in Hitchcock’s Psycho. I reassured myself with the thought that the Chicago police knew where I was. |
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