As standard in all American hotel rooms, there should be a bedside drawer, containing a Gideon's Bible and a selection of guns.
Simply fire one of the guns repeatedly out of the window, and the barrel should heat up - then dip the heated gun barrel into the cup of water, and the water should boil.
This is the American way.
Who are the fucking Gideons? Ever met one? No! Ever seen one? No! But they're all over the fucking world, putting Bibles in hotel rooms. Every hotel room: "this Bible was placed here by a Gideon." When? I've been here all day and I ain't seen shit! I saw the housekeeper come and go, I saw the minibar guy come and go, I've never laid eyes on a fucking Gideon. What are they, ninjas? Where are they? Where are they from, Gidya? Who the fuck are these people?
I'm not convinced the hotels just don't buy the Bibles.
If it was an actual person going around providing all the bibles wouldn't they have to book all of the rooms, surely that would mean that some rooms didn't get a Bible, because they weren't free at the time. But you never see that, you never see a hotel where just one of the rooms has a Bible. It's either all of the rooms, or none of the rooms.
I think it's probably just hotel policy to have Bibles, and it's been like that for years, and now no one really cares anymore but they've still got the Bibles so they're still in the drawers.
Gideons are a guild of Master Lockpickers, so they used to pick the locks of all the hotel rooms to leave their bibles.
These days, improved hotel security means that in many countries, the Gideon bible is less common than it used to be.
where the fuck do they come from? Gidea?
The Gideons give out the books in bulk to the hotels, rather than using secret agents.
You could also a rev up an SUV for 2 minutes and heat a glass placed on the engine.
I think that's called the Dakota Freedom Boil
That's a great point - especially if you're at a proper "all-American" hotel, where each hotel room has an en-suite-car-park.
Mate I'm in a diner and I laughed so hard people turned round and looked. Thank you for helping me laugh through this traumatic situation.
Just carry around a copy of darwin's evolutionary tomes. Toss one on top of the bible, and use the resulting fire to warm the cup of water. As the darwin tome will be unharmed by the fire due to its superiority, you can reuse as needed in your travels.
if you want the full american experience, pay $10 + tip for a lukewarm (by the time you get it) cup of water and a lipton tea bag from room service.
if I want tea I have to microwave it.
Wtf do I do?
Uh, microwave it?
Stay where you are and we’ll have someone there with chocolate digestives in a jiffy. The important thing is to not panic.
You are a true hero. God bless you.
My sister once tried to tell my aunt that there was 0 difference between tea which had been heated up in a microwave with the tea bag already in it versus tea that had been made to my aunt's specifications (boil the water, not in the microwave, and then put the tea in it and let it steep).
They had a vigorous disagreement about it, which ended with my sister making up two mugs of tea as a blind taste test and then presenting them to my aunt. My aunt instantly told her which one was the microwave tea and which was the proper tea. My sister admitted to the correction and from then on made the tea according to specifications.
My sister admitted to the correction and from then on made the tea according to specifications.
TIL: When talking about tea, Brits sound like us Germans. ;-)
Nope, you guys think all teas are equal and dont just have a single shelf with black tea labels and some fruit teas under it - you have a a whole damn aisle of "tea", where caffeine is just another fruit
I was thinking more about specifying an everyday process down to insanely detailed levels.
Best making a DIN-norm out of it, to be on the safe side...
Our understanding of tea is largely crap though, that part is right... Although it is getting better, some tea culture is spilling over from you guys. :-)
I had this arguement with an international student at university.
The thing is when you're boiling water in the kettle you're heating all of the water to a very high temperature. When you boil it in a microwave only the water molecules near the surface are actually getting heated because they absorb the microwave energy which essentially blocks other water molecules from receiving any energy, also the cup will also absorb a lot of the microwave energy. So the only water molecules getting heated are the ones at the surface.
So in a kettle you boil bottom up which agitates the water at the bottom causing it to bubble up to the top allowing more water to be boiled at the bottom, in a microwave your boiling the water top down, which means the water at the top boils and often then just fucks off into the rest of the microwave, so you get uneven heating and therefore it tastes weird.
If you boil water in a glass cup in a microwave the glass doesn't absorb the microwave radiation as much, and you get better heating, but that tends to break the cup.
There is a reason no one boils water in a microwave if they have a kettle. It tastes awful.
Microwaves can generally reach up to nearly 3/4" in water. If heating 8oz in a glass, that should still heat the water evenly enough, since the microwaves will still mostly pass through the glass.
Heating in shorter increments and stirring in between should help avoid breaking the glass, and heat the water more evenly. If you take the time, it should be identical to kettle boiled water. That's why people prefer a kettle to a microwave, it's much faster and far less effort.
But the sister also performed that experiment in the worst possible way, why did she microwave the actual tea bag?!
You got a microwave in your room? Lucky, must be upscale.
It seems to be a standard for US hotels. They always seem to have a microwave, a mini fridge that you know not to touch, and an air conditioning system that rattles away and cools the room to absolute zero. I suspect the air conditioning system would be present even in Alaskan hotels.
Having stayed in a number of hotels, but by no means an exhaustive amount, microwaves and mini-fridges are absolutely no guarantee. You're more likely to have a hair dryer bolted to the wall and a small single cup (though still loose ground based) coffee maker than the other two.
They have a machine that does it for you, it's voice activated, but it's a bit naff. Take the phone on your desk, dial zero and instruct it to bring boiling water to your room for the purpose of brewing tea. Then, for a small charge it will arrive 10 - 45 minutes later.
microwave the water separately and pour it in.
There’s no Keurig in the room for hot water?
Aight, a few suggestions so you can have something approaching a decent cup.
Assuming you're stuck with bags, which isn't the best tea, how you heat the water only matters a little and you can get a fairly similar state with a microwave.
Nuke the water twice. It's going to vary depending on the microwave, obviously, but this the low powered stuff in most hotel rooms, go with 1:30 twice. The water should be just under boiling after the second zap. Stir in between, then stir before dunking bags. This also assumes a "coffee mug" sized vessel, which is usually about 8oz (y'all brits still use those liquid measures? I'm not sure, but I can calculate the CCs if you don't have access to an app for that). If the cups are smaller, maybe do two one-minute zaps and check the temp.
Now, if you've got loose tea and your own steeper, it's about the same, but you can go a little hotter (more hot? My brain can't parse the right grammar) since the steeper will suck up some of the heat, and do so quickly.
Tbh though, the difference in nuked tea and more properly steeped is likely moot if you're using the bags the hotel provides. Most of those are utter crap even by US hot tea standards.
That's also assuming the front desk doesn't have kettles. They aren't usually in rooms, but some places do have them available on request, particularly in cities, and even moreso in cities they have a lot of European/British visitors.
You'll likely need to warm the cuppa
This is lifesaving advice! Thanks so much
Pro tip. Microwave the water, THEN steep the tea.
Use the coffee maker to heat water?
Don't do that. You'll get coffee flavored tea, which is no good at all.
Call up the office, ask them if they have a kettle for guests to use. Might get lucky.
Does it matter how the water's heated? I've used microwaves (with a Pyrex measuring cup) and a kettle, for both coffee and tea, and it's fine.
A comment in this thread mentions microwaving the water with the tea bag in it. Don't do that. Heat the water to boiling in glass, put tea bag in cup (or coffee in filter in pourover cone) and pour. Steep to taste.
Microwave the water first and when it's boiling do the deed.
edit: I just want to mention to anyone reading this that you can superheat the water (it won't boil but it'll react violently when stirred) so be careful!
Use the clothes iron.
I think you answered your question, microwave it.
I usually carry my hiking backpack with me when I'm away from home so that has a little mess kit I can use, if I need to cook something I can place it on the hotel iron, comes in clutch at times.
Judging by what I hear people do to hotel kettles in UK perhaps it's a good thing. I'd assume all kettles have had bodily fluids in them much too recently.
Be very hesitant about microwaving water, it can become supercritical.
Advice seems to be to put a teaspoon in.
Or a little wooden utensil if you are nervous about the metal.
Something wooden would do it. Nucleation points to promote normal boiling
I had to live in one of those hotels for almost two weeks. I ended up going to a hardware store for a bottle of yellow HEET and a soda can to make an alcohol stove. I carefully situated it on top of the sink drain and balanced my camp cup on two crossed coat hangers above it. I made soup. That was what it took to make fucking soup.
No, not from out of the country, I live here. I was homeless, and needed to make some fucking soup in the only place I could stay.
A lot of hotel rooms have a coffee pot. Put water in it with no coffee to get hot water.
Decades-old-coffee-remains-flavoured hot water?
Yep.
George Washington will come for you, if you don't.
Can't you just smoke meth like everyone else?
A casual place for banter and anything that doesn't fit in anywhere else.
Have chat and a natter. Talk about anything and everything that's not political!
Keep it casual.
Here:
Elsewhere: