The Landlady makes the most of free breakfasts

Having spent the best part of the last 10 years avoiding travelling by budget airline, I am now a huge fan of the Big Orange One. It is air travel as it should be with minimum fuss, making catching a plane as easy as catching a bus. During the Easter Holidays, myself, my friend B and The Big Daughter jetted off to the furthest destination that the Big Orange One flies to. Amman in Jordan. I first went to Jordan five years ago and completely fell in love with it, so it was nice to go back for half the price.

We spent the first three nights in the uber-luxurious (yet not very expensive, considering) Kempinski on The Dead Sea. The Kempinski is the most luxurious hotel I have ever stayed in, boasting at least nine swimming pools and a breakfast buffet that would put an Arabian Sheik’s wedding banquet to shame. Even when the hotel is full, so vast are its portals that it seems like you are the only people there. We were upgraded to a villa as the hotel was fully booked and in the villa was a list of room fragrances you could choose for your living room. It is not the sort of hotel I usually stay in, quite the opposite in fact, but on this occasion with little other choice, I forced myself.

Because breakfast was included in the room rate, we took to secreting away as much of it as possible to eat for lunch and sometimes dinner. My friend B was lucky enough to have brought a Tupperware box with her and The Small Daughter had the ingenious idea of stuffing the shower-cap from our room full of bread rolls, ham, cheese and muffins. There was also free Cava with breakfast, which was rather dangerous for someone like me, yet something I could easily get used to.

“The Small Daughter had the ingenious idea of stuffing the shower-cap full of bread rolls, ham, cheese and muffins”

Although the breakfast food was free, any other food ordered at the hotel was hideously expensive and had to be taken alongside a dining-room full of ‘beige’ (i.e Gucci-wearing) people, so for dinner, we would order one dish from room service and share it, although, due to lack of plates, one of us had to eat from a butter dish and The Small Daughter had to eat from a teapot lid. We were actually quite relieved to leave our luxury prison after a couple of days and travel South to Petra where at least we could afford to eat proper Jordanian food, rather than eat faux Italian from a teapot lid, or ham rolls from a shower cap…