Suddenly, my already beautiful view gets taken another notch up by a beautiful and shapely woman who walks by along the extended balcony running across the hotel floor. She stops right in front of my room’s open balcony doors, turns her back to me, and spends a few minutes gazing down the horizon. She’s wearing a long, tight-filling, thin cotton skirt that lets through some of the sun's rays, which had been bathing my face until this most welcome interruption.
I know she must have sensed my presence, but she didn’t acknowledge me for a couple of minutes. She just lifts her left bare foot from her thin leather sandal and seductively runs it up and down her right leg. She extended forward as if to look at something under the balcony, and there was no longer any doubt that there was nothing between that long, thin cotton skirt and those curves that would give Michael Schumacher a tough time negotiating on the racing track.
She leans back from the balcony’s ledge, turns around, and smiles as she catches my eye. She’s wearing a white scarf over her head, and I notice that she’s carrying a bucket of soap water in her right hand. Within seconds, she’s gone.
The next day, a few minutes before I get ready to go out for my breakfast, I hear a knock on my door. It was her again. This time, she’s carrying a fresh supply of blankets and pillows. I smile and thank her. I turn around and study the tourism map on my desk as she proceeds to change my sheets. I was still busy making my itinerary for the day when she was done, and before she left, I felt her hand gently slide across my waist as she playfully pinched my left love handle. She then proceeds to leave the room with a chuckle.
So now I’m beginning to think that the previous day’s balcony episode may not have been so accidental after all. I take my keys, lock my room and head just across the hall to the welcome desk to leave my keys. As I was checking out, she was there chatting with the hotel manager. I smile at both of them, and the manager gives me a look that is unmistakable to any red-blooded man. So, within a nanosecond, I suddenly got the picture. I got a deal, and it's alright with this small hotel.
Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I brought the topic up with an American tourist around my age who was there for a week. He was somewhat shocked when I told him about my experience because he said another hotel maid was being extremely “friendly” to him as well. Long story short, after some investigation with other hotel guests and even some cooperative hotel staff, I came to find out that the maid jobs at this small but upscale hotel were highly sought-after jobs by local women hoping to meet affluent tourists. There were stories of maids marrying off Americans and moving to California or New York. Apparently, some of these maids were educated women looking for a way out of Costa Rica. All of them were beautiful.
When I came back to Toronto a couple of weeks later, some of my female friends were appalled that the hotel would knowingly not only allow but actually tacitly encourage this form of “basic prostitution.” Ironically, that same week I came back into town, there were ads in the Metro for the Millionaire’s Club dating service. This company encourages “suitable” women to “apply” to join a dating service catering to rich men. Strangely, some of these same women looking down at the maids from “Heartbeat Hotel” in Costa Rica were more accepting of the idea of the Millionaire’s Club. I found that interesting.
The following statement from an interview in Hillary Magazine with Patti Stanger, the California-based owner and founder of the now international "Millionaires Club", says it all: “The number-one criterion for a female, surprisingly enough, is that she must not be a gold digger. My girl must never ask for anything. … Now, if she wants to accept whatever a male client offers her, that's another story, and the men are extremely generous. … The woman must give back to their men by making them dinner, baking them cookies or cleaning their closets." Patti is very strict on this. "Life is give and take, not just take take take." Women must show appreciation, too. However, when a woman touches money in front of a man, she sends a subliminal message she is the male, and he turns it off; it is much better to give your man a gift the old-fashioned way with a big fat kiss.”
Like Arsenio Hall used to say back in the day, that’s one of those things that make you say hummmmm ...
