Review of Hotel Christiania Teater 4*

Well, the breakfast offering was good. As for the rest of the stay, I found the experience at the Hotel Christiana to be barely tolerable. I chose the hotel based on online reviews, but those travelers must have had different rooms or had business in the area. Let’s start with the location itself. The hotel exterior is fine, but the location is well away from sights that a leisure visitor to Oslo might want to see. Fortunately, the hotel is close to the local stop (Nationalthearet) for tram and train lines, so visitors who can navigate the relatively easy transportation system can get to sights and decent restaurants. That said, the National Gallery is within easy walking distance. The restaurants near the hotel are mediocre, at best. The restaurant in the hotel is terrific for breakfast, but serves mediocre pizza for dinner. I realize that the hotel is converted from a older building, but the lobby is very cramped, so if more than one party arrives to check in, the space is overrun with luggage. There are three steps up to the elevator, which makes it difficult for nearly everyone to maneuver their luggage to the lift upon arrival or departure. We were assigned a room on the seventh floor, which required we get off the elevator at the sixth floor (it doesn’t go to the seventh), wind our way around the hallways, drag our luggage down three steps, go down another hallway, carry our luggage up a flight of stairs, and find our way to the room. There was no offer of help to find our room or help with our bags. While the room was spacious enough, we felt it was designed with the mindset of “let’s make this as inconvenient for the guest as possible. ” There were no shelves at all in the shower for shampoo, soap, etc. So we had to put our bathing toiletries on the floor. The bathmat was placed on a rack about six feet (three metres) away from the shower, so one had to drip water across the bathroom to reach the mat after showering. The mattress on the bed was a rather uncomfortable foam, rather than a proper, supportive mattress. One of the windows was designed as a frosted square, with no curtains, so we had to stuff pillows from the sofa in that window to block out the early-morning summer light. There were no drawers or storage in the room for personal items, so we basically had to “live out of our luggage” for the time we stayed at the hotel. The desk chair was basically non-functional; there were no wheels (so adjusting your chair position meant lifting the chair to move it closer to the desk) ; the latch that would hold the back of the chair vertical did not work, so we were constantly in “recline” mode, which is not conducive for working at the desk; and there was so little room between the chair and the bed that one of us had to crawl around to the foot of the mattress to get out of the bed if the other person was using the desk chair. But, as I wrote in the begging paragraph, the breakfast offering was the best part of our stay, with a wide array of foods available from the buffet. However, a great breakfast is not nearly enough to make me stay at this hotel ever again.