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At the railway station of Gdansk I was met by a fussy local official.

“We have decided to put you up at one of our new hotels as a sort of …er… experiment,” he chuckled. I never enjoyed being a guinea pig, but there wasn’t much of a choice.

The hotel was just a five-minute walk from the station. ‘Lido. Restaurant - NightClub’ ran a bright pink sign on its roof. Two burly security guards with square shoulders and broken noses blocked my way. I tried to explain that I had a booking, but they kept pushing me away from the door.

A huge gorilla-like man ran out of the building. He threw the guards aside with a brisk wave of his hairy left hand - he was twice as thick and robust as any of them - and simultaneously extended his right palm, the size of an excavator’s digging bucket.

“Maciek, the hotel owner,” he introduced himself and added: “You are our very first guest. Welcome.”

We climbed a narrow dark staircase and found ourselves in a small room, lit with a treacherous pink light. An empty bar stand was in the corner. There were no spirits or wines on the shelves above the bar - only bottles with mineral water and … an impressive selection of condoms. A stunning long-haired blonde, wearing a transparent blouse and such a short mini that one could be forgiven for thinking that she had forgotten to put her skirt on, materialized from one of the room’s darker corners. “This is Angela, our receptionist,” explained Maciek.

The sight of my dog-eared Australian passport, which I had dutifully produced for registering, made Angela all gooey-eyed:

“Ah, Australia. It is my dream…!” she sang in passable English.

Maciek told me that they had six rooms in the hotel, and as a special first guest of honour I was assigned the best luxury suite, which he, Maciek, normally used himself.

The “suite” consisted of two rooms - a lounge with an old squeaky sofa covered with cigarette burns, and a bedroom. The furniture was drab and battered. The TV set was firmly tuned to one and the same channel showing an erotic movie in German. The menu on the coffee table informed that the night club downstairs worked from one a.m. to six a.m. which didn’t bode well for a good night’s sleep.

Having seen many hotels in my life, I was nevertheless puzzled to the extreme. Pondering over the mystery of “Lido”, I sat down onto the bed and… some unknown force suddenly pushed me onto my back, then threw me up in the air and - after a brief levitation - precipitated me onto the floor. I felt like a hapless cowboy trying to harness an obnoxious wild stallion in an American prairie.

Rubbing a fresh lump on my head, I crawled to the offensive bed on my knees and cautiously - as if I was probing water in a bathtub to make sure it was not boiling hot - touched the mattress with my index finger. The mattress recoiled from my touch and started rocking up and down, as if it was floating on top of a sea-wave.

“Do you enjoy your water-bed?” Maciek’s voice sounded from behind my back. He had entered the room without knocking.

“I think it’s fine for anything, except for sleeping,” I replied.

“Nonsense! You will sleep like a baby,” he assured me.

In the middle of the night, I was woken by a deafening sound of music from underneath. It was so loud that it filled my “luxury suite” to the brim and rocked my water-bed by its sheer volume. In the short intervals between the blasts, I could hear many more noises reaching me from the hotel’s corridor: slamming of doors, playful screams of women. I could even hear a dog barking. From the street, there came a distinctive clap-clap of multiple gunshots: the vigilant security guards were probably reasoning with some pushy late comers.

Having given up all hopes of falling asleep, I started leafing through the hotel’s glossy brochure, from which I learnt that the night-club offered “erotic show, striptease, women mud and oil wrestling, sexy excitement, charming company of beautiful hostesses, pig’s feet with beer, and pig’s feet with shaved (sic) horseradish.”

My last doubts as to the exact nature of the hotel evaporated: it was a brothel, and its name should have been not "Lido", but "Libido”!

“Breakfast?” the skirt-less Angela asked me next morning.

“And what’s on your breakfast menu? Shaved radishes? Oily hostesses? Condoms with eggs?” I asked in return. Without waiting for her to reply I ran down the stairs and out into the street.

I thought that the experiment of my hosts, who had put me up at a brothel, was probably a success. From their point of view, that is…

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