So, my goal of establishing a weekly Monday post was kind of killed by the fact that I had a job interview on Monday, but the good news is if I get a job, then my schedule should regularize again and maybe I’ll find a consistent time of the week to write these things. Although, to be fair, I don’t think the blogging gods will ever provide me with an ideal writing environment like I had in France ever again. Seriously, there’s nothing to spur creative impulses like a 12 hour a week job. Nothing. Beautiful women and unrequited love might come close, but how can you really take time to feel and emote about those things if you’re working 60 hours a week? That’s right. You can’t. Actually, the job I interviewed for is 40 hours a week with 25 vacation days a year, so it’s probably as close of an equivalent as I’ll ever find. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed.
Anyway, back to my unfinished business with hostels. Now, we covered last week the reasons that these fine institutions can be advantageous to a budget traveler, and if you are truly on a tight budget when you travel, I would encourage you to adhere to the platitude that beggars can’t be choosers. However, if you are not a beggar, but a well-to-do chooser planning a dream vacation, there are a few reasons that hostels might not be to your taste. Again, none of these reasons has anything to do with Quentin Tarantino movies. I haven’t seen them, and I don’t want to, but I would imagine that comparing a real hostel experience to those movies would be like comparing a nativity play to “The Passion of the Christ”. That being said, although the odds of being tortured in a hostel are comparable to the odds of Jon Greene finding Jesus, here are some mishaps and discomforts that might befall you:
5. Accessories (or lack thereof)
You know what I love about hotels? They always provide all your sheets, your towels, even soap and shampoo for the bathroom. Sometimes the even give you mini deodorants, aftershaves and mouthwashes. Everything you need for an overnight stay, except maybe a toothbrush (in all honesty, though, who would want to use a hotel toothbrush? I would imagine they would be as useless as hotel razors). Not only can you use these accessories, you can steal them (and it’s not really even stealing; it’s like taking mints or toothpicks from the little bowls at the front of a restaurant. This way, even when you’re paying exorbitant hotel prices you can say to yourself, “at least I got something out of it.” It’s like in Liar Liar when Jim Carrey steals the car air freshener and he’s like “I’m taking this!” It just makes you feel better. Do you know how many of these little goodies are provided at hostels? Zero. You’re expected to bring your own sheets (or pay the hostel for a set of theirs), your own towel, sometimes even your own pillow. There’s normally toilet paper in the bathroom, but you’re not going to find soap or shampoo unless an unlucky traveler forgot theirs and left it there for you (which has actually happened to me two or three times). This even sometimes cuts down on the money advantage hostels have over hotels — 25 euros a night doesn’t seem as cheap when you have to shell out another 7 euros for your sheets, and another 3 euros for your towel. And you’re not going to walk out with any stolen souvenirs unless you steal something from one of your roommates, which you could get caught and prosecuted for. So unless you travel with a full set of toiletries, sheets and linens, you might want to consider a hotel the next time you travel.
4. Silence (or lack thereof)
A hostel is not a very happy place for light sleepers. This is because hostels are able to offer cheap beds by piling as many as they can into a room at one time. The fewest number of beds you will ever encounter in a hostel room is two or three, and this is very rare. Reasonably, you should expect to stay in a room with 4-8 beds, and sometimes be placed in a room with as many as 20 or 25. The most populated room I ever stayed in held 16, but I’ve seen multiple places on hostelworld.com that have 20-person rooms. Believe me, 16 is no walk in the park. I mean, even in a fairly large room, sixteen people and all of their luggage can make for a crowded situation. Crowded situations typically make for noisy situations. Think about it, which would you expect to be louder, a dinner for two at a restaurant, or a school cafeteria? That’s a slight exaggeration of the difference between a private hotel room and a 16-person hostel room. Another problem is the fact that it is highly unlikely that 16 people will all have the same sleep schedules. There are few things in life that I find more irritating than being woken up by rowdy drunk people at four in the morning after a long, tiring day of sightseeing. Wet socks, chapped ass, and the rest of my top 5 pet peeves are probably more irritating, but this merits at least an honorable mention I think. The noise doesn’t even always come from inside your room; another side effect of hostel cheapness is thin walls. In some cases, the obnoxious drunk people could be two rooms over, or outside, and still wake you up. If you want peace and quiet, stick to hotels (and libraries). You won’t always find it at a hostel.
3. Comfort (or lack thereof)
This was already led into by my accessories rant in number 5. Sometimes in life, you just want certain creature comforts. You won’t find these creature comforts at a hostel. Even if you buy (rent?) their sheets and pillows, they probably aren’t very high thread count (you can tell someone knows their sheets and pillows when they can talk thread count). Also, the beds that you put the sheets and pillows on leave something to be desired. Pretty much every hostel I’ve ever stayed in uses bunk beds, and even though I thought that bunk beds were the coolest thing of all time when I was ten years old, something about them just doesn’t appeal to me all that much now that I’m twenty three. Maybe it’s the fact that the guy in the bunk above me is one of the drunk obnoxious people that wakes me up at four in the morning. Maybe it’s the fact that my feet hit the footboard because the bed isn’t long enough. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s a tear in the mattress that I can feel through these low thread-count sheets. Maybe it’s the fact that they use those green, plastic covered army mattresses that sound like a tarp being ruffled every time you roll over. Now, not all of these have happened at the same time, but they have each happened during nights I’ve spent in hostels. But isn’t the bunk-bed thing an interesting question. I mean, we all love them as kids, and then something changes. I loved top bunk as a kid; I can’t stand it now. Bunk beds went the way of egg salad, PB&J sandwiches, and candy corn. Wait, that’s not true. I never liked candy corn.
2. Privacy (or lack thereof)
This is another side effect of cramming 16 people into a room. Aside from the noise level, it tends to have a detrimental effect on your personal space. Add to that the fact that the rooms are generally coed, and the fact that bathrooms are shared (often also coed), and you have a situation that was not designed for the socially inhibited. If you’ve ever lived in a dorm, a hostel won’t be anything that new or scary to you, but if you like to be able to change into your nightclothes without the company of five or six members of the opposite sex, then a hostel could pose some slight social discomfort to you. I know, some of you are probably thinking, “Wow, girls change right there in the room with you?” but it’s really only a positive when the girls in your room are attractive. If the girls in your room are from Germany, you probably have nothing to worry about, but think about what percentage of people in the world you’d actually like to see in their underwear, and that’s probably representative of what you’ll see in a hostel.
There is one other problem with the masses of people in hostel rooms, and that problem can be summed up with two letters: B.O. You might not think this is a major problem; you might think that you’re exempt, or that not all people stink, but under the right circumstances, anyone can fall victim to their own glands. I know that I sweat in my sleep, and if you fill a room with 12-16 guys like me, it can make a room pretty rank pretty quick. You never notice it when you first wake up, but you notice it as soon as you come back from the shower. “Oh my God! Did something die in here? We need to open a window, stat!” You female readers out there might be laughing at this phenomenon as a guy problem, but I just this year shared a six-person room with five girls, and believe me, it wasn’t any better. I was surprised; I thought that woman-sweat smelled like pretty flowers and baked goods. Turns out it smells pretty much like MAN-sweat, only you can still smell undertones of perfume and body lotion under it. That’s one reason I like staying in a hotel; I know the only MAN-sweat stinking up the room is my own. It’s more pure, somehow.
1. Extreme Shadiness (or lack ther…wait a minute…)
For the record, most hostels exhibit a fine and upstanding lack of shadiness (especially Swiss hostels, or Hosteling International ones). If you decide to take your chances with a cheap online venture, however, you never know what you’re getting yourself into (except for the fact that you know that it will be nothing like the Quentin Tarantino films). To illustrate my point, I will now relate the anecdote of the sketchiest hostel I’ve ever stayed in (for those of you who know me, you’ve probably heard this already). Anyway, my friend Jon Greene and I went to the South of France for our February break, and spent four days in the lovely town of Nice. During our trip planning, which we did probably two days before we left we found a hostel that was super cheap (I think it was something like 10 or 12 euros a night) during a search online. We booked two beds online and printed off directions. When we read the directions, we became a bit curious about the nature of our hostel. The directions told us, once we arrived at the given address, to enter the main floor of a restaurant and ask for the “pink lady”. Jon and I were wondering if we had booked four nights in some kind of brothel, but as it turned out the pink lady was like 70 years old, and our hostel was just a cheap, crappy hostel. There were cracks in the walls, we had to cross through someone else’s room to get to our room, and the bathroom was about the size of a broom closet (seriously, I could have peed into the toilet while standing in the shower without any particular effort). Worst of all, though, were the creepy crawlies. I remember an ant crawling up the wall one afternoon as I lay in bed, and another crawling on me one night as I lay in bed. Then, one night, as I went to the fridge to get a drink (because I didn’t trust the tapwater, although, come to think of it, it was pretty sweet that we had a fridge), the light from the refrigerator caused several small creatures to crawl away into the corners of the room, and I was suddenly very grateful I’d put my sandals on.
Thats about as bad as it can get, I think. Any exceeding sketchiness that I can think of would have to come from your roommates, and I don’t think you can blame that entirely on the hostel. I’ve never roomed with anyone that creepy, most of my roommates have either been kind and interesting, or obnoxious, drunken party fiends, or both. Hopefully if you ever stay in a hostel, you’ll meet an exotic foreign person who’s as hot as Aram’s sister (trying to get back to my roots with Aram’s hot sister references).
Well, that rounds out today’s top 5. I really should try to stay on schedule and write at least one post per week. If I get lazy again, feel free to comment on my posts and say something like “HEY! STOP SLACKING OFF AND WRITE ALREADY!” Comments get forwarded to my email, and so that is a good way to get my attention. Tootles.
