Hotel Rooms on Alien Planets: Why Every Galaxy Has a Broken Mini-Fridge

(Field Notes from the Panam Interplanetary Travel Journal, Vol. 3)

Every planet I’ve visited — Earth included — has one thing in common: hotel rooms that look clean enough to trust and suspicious enough to doubt.

It’s universal. Cosmic, even. Somewhere in the fabric of spacetime, there’s a law that says every hotel must contain one light switch that does nothing, one towel that feels like sandpaper, and one mini-fridge that hums like it’s trying to communicate with the mothership.

The Arrival Phase

Check-in is an ancient ritual shared across galaxies.

You approach a desk where a smiling lifeform greets you with the sacred words: “Your room isn’t ready yet.”

You nod, pretending you understand time, space, and why check-in is always exactly four hours after you arrived.

Eventually, you’re given a keycard — a small, plastic symbol of hope that will immediately fail to open your door on the first try. And the second.

The Habitat

Every hotel room follows the same template, no matter what world you’re on.

One bed (too soft or too sentient).
One painting (always abstract, always unsettling).
One TV remote that’s seen things.

The lighting? A mysterious experiment in photonics: either interrogation-level bright or romantic-candlelight dim. Never in between.

And that thermostat — the universal mystery box. You set it to 21°C, and the room instantly becomes either the surface of Venus or the moon’s shadow side.

The Mini-Fridge Phenomenon

Scientists have yet to explain why the mini-fridge never fully functions.

It’s cold enough to hope, but not cold enough to trust. It hums, it buzzes, it occasionally clicks like it’s solving quantum equations.

Inside:

• One can of seltzer older than the Big Bang
• Three unidentified liquids that glow faintly
• A note reminding you that removing anything will cost more than your flight

If I ever find a working hotel mini-fridge, I’ll report it to NASA as proof of parallel universes.

The Bathroom Abyss

No matter the planet, the shower controls are a puzzle designed to humble even the most advanced species.

Turn left for cold. Turn right for regret.

The water pressure varies between “light mist of disappointment” and “hydraulic excavation.” You either freeze or achieve orbital velocity.

The provided shampoo bottle will, without fail, contain exactly one-third of the amount you need.

The Morning After

You wake up groggy, staring at curtains that somehow block 90% of light and 0% of noise.

The coffee machine — if you can call it that — sits on the counter like an alien artifact. You feed it a pod, press a glowing button, and hope for caffeine. Instead, it spits out a mysterious liquid with the flavor profile of existential dread.

You drink it anyway. Because survival.

The Departure Ritual

You pack faster than physics allows, suddenly realizing you have more socks than you arrived with but fewer chargers.

You check under the bed for lost items and immediately regret it.

You sign the receipt, whisper a prayer to the mini-fridge gods, and step back into gravity.

At the front desk, they ask, “How was your stay?”

You smile, say “great,” and mean “I lived.”

If space travel teaches you perspective, hotels teach you humility.

Every room, no matter the galaxy, is a small reminder that comfort is a relative term — and that even light-years from home, someone, somewhere, still hasn’t figured out how to make decent coffee.

by PanAm – Intergalactic traveler. Professional towel critic. Firm believer that no one in the universe actually understands thermostats.