(by the way the other Vitebsk hotel listed in the Vitebsk hotels section called the Eridan is the same hotel as the Best Eastern Eridan).

After reading the other Vitebsk hotel reviews , this one seemed to be the "best" of the bunch, all things considering...
Unsurprisingly though, it was everything I thought it would be...!

Climbing up the stairs (no lift), the single standard rooms are as bad as displayed on the hotel's own website - grim, shabby, and beds that reminded me of prison. And that's a compliment! So we went down those steep stairs and luckily we were told there were 2 suites available. The receptionist who spoke English was honest -she deducted what we'd already paid off the price of our upgrades.

My companion's suite was room 49 on the 4th floor next door to single rooms with rather leery men hanging around in the corridor eyeing her up, and when I went to see her room like her I too felt sick. Firstly the smell - not only of an unaired room, but the bedding too. It must have been months since that bedding was washed. The mattress was lumpy and there were stains all over the place. And a cluster of dead flies on the window sills. The bath looked as if someone had poured acid in it as the enamel looked bubbly, the towels stunk, and the sink wasn't secured to the wall properly. No air conditioning, and had she opened the window, those living in the blocks opposite her room would be able to see in. Impossible to keep the windows shut owing to the smell of the room. Her door could have easily have been opened from the outside by using a screwdriver; I'm glad she vacated that room & thankfully the hotel staff didn't make a fuss and refunded the money straight away.

So she came to my "suite" (which had a proper lock) and slept on the couch. My room, the other suite, was room 27 on the 2nd floor. I opened my window and the smell of a deep fat fryer overtook it was sickly and horrible, so my windows stayed shut. Luckily though, my suite smelt fresh, there was a working air conditioning unit in it, and the armchair & couch were clean and very comfortable. I urge you to check the hotel's own website for a laugh as the decor of this suite was utterely hideous! Whoever thought it up needs to be locked up!!! Clashing, strong colours, odd painted shapes like traffic lights and wierd furniture, nothing matched at all, and a light resembling a tarrantula spider! You just had to laugh at their version of "art" , it was like a student had a mad idea in the middle of the night - absolutely awful and in no way calming! But we preferred to be dazzled by the extreme, crazy colour system instead of sleeping upstairs with a bunch of dead flies.
While the sink in room 27 was attached to the wall, the toilet top was not, so one had to flush with care!
After our experience of room 49, we decided not to have a shower the thought of using their towels made us feel ill - we wouldn't have been able to shower even if we wanted to anyway as the shower was out of reach & hooked so high up.

We decided to eat dinner out as that deep fried smell made us feel sick. There was a taverna up the road on the corner near the park called Golden-something, which was very tasty, spotlessly clean and very cheap with fab coffee so we were relieved about that. You may have to impersonate an ice cube here as they didn't speak English.

We were a bit cautious about the hotel's breakfast but their pancakes were ok, but again, that deep fried smell wafted all over the place so we had a quick breakfast to just get out into the fresh air. Even the lobby, lounge and reception area stunk of it.

The hotel was close to Marc Chagall house/museum, and there's a supermarket around the corner from the hotel too as well as a couple of other eateries on that main road. But these points would not be enough to entice me to stay here again! The hotel was severely overpriced, needs a hotel inspector to close it down till for hygiene reasons, and the staff should be forced to visit proper hotels elsewhere in Belarus to learn what a suite really is.