Hotel

Ah, January.  Bit grim, isn't it?  No wonder so many people are starting to plan their summer holidays, even though we are about as far away from summer as it is humanly possible to be.

If you are one of them, and this year you're looking to stay somewhere a little bit different, then boy do I have the answer for you.

Why, yes, Virginia - that IS a hamster wheel.

Welcome to Villa Hamster; a gite in Nantes, France where, for the mere price of 99 Euros* a night, you and a friend or partner can have the full hamster experience. You can run in a hamster wheel, eat seeds, drink from a squeezy plastic water bottle attached the wall and, if you want to, you can get dressed up.  As a hamster.    Apparently modern hamsters need espresso machines and free wifi, so those things are provided too.

At only 18 square metres, the room doesn't sound very comfortable (you can read a review here or here or here) but my guess is, if you're the kind of person who would go all the way to France just so you can pretend you're a hamster, you are not the kind of person to get bogged down in details like that.

The gite is the brainchild of businessman Yuan Fulquero, who owns more hotels than just this one and says he wants to cater for tourists who are after something  "a little bit strange." One of the articles I've been reading about him contains a sentence  I had to read seventeen times before it made any kind of sense:

He is also looking for investors to fund France's first tourist uterus

I think Yuan has the "little bit strange" angle more or less covered.

*The price was tipped to rise to 150 Euros a night in 2010; no word on whether this has happened.