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Because a lot of British hotels are old, they're often less comfortable than hotels in other countries. But they're always more interesting. Every hotel's different: there are hotels with low ceilings and small rooms and there are hotels built like churches; there are hotels with five rooms and there are hotels with five hundred. In Scotland, there are even hotels that were once castles.
Some of the biggest hotels were built in the Nineteenth Century and haven't changed much since then. They have heavy furniture and thick carpets, and wide halls and lounges where everyone talks quietly. The waiters and porters are usually old men who tell everyone that they've worked in the hotel for sixty years.
The oldest hotels are the inns. These are pubs that have rooms for guests. Some of them are four or five hundred years old and were the hotels where the coaches stopped.
But the cheapest and most interesting kind of hotel is the guest house. These are houses with a sign in front of them that says: BED AND BREAKFAST. They have names like 'Sea Breeze' or 'Happy Days: and they usually belong to a rather fat woman.
Some of these landladies are very good, and are like mothers to their guests; others are very fierce, and put up notices everywhere in the house that say: PLEASE SHUT THE DOOR, DON'T FORGET TO TURN OFF THE LIGHT, or GUESTS MUST BE HOME BEFORE TEN O'CLOCK.
The rooms in guest houses are usually full of old furniture that the landlady's family has had for fifty years. She's put it in the rooms so that she needn't look at it herself !
In the morning, all the guests have breakfast together in the dining-room. There are usually several old ladies and an old man who once lived in India. Nobody talks; everybody eats and reads his paper. When a guest comes in, everybody looks up and says: "Good morning.. . " and begins to read again.
One of the strangest British traditions is 'early morning tea'. The waiter or landlady comes into your room at half-past seven, wakes you and puts a cup of tea into your hand. For most people, there are few things that they enjoy less than hot tea at half-past seven in the morning... but for the British it's an important part of their holiday!