I learnt my lesson to put a little more thought into my safety from the first night I spent solo travelling: having arrived a little nervous, found new friends and gone out to a bar together, I found myself at the end of the night alone in a random square in Madrid, separated from everyone because of a drunken fight in the street which the police had to break up. I have no idea how I made it home that night.
Hopefully having wised up a little, some weeks later my best friend and I were on a boat to Dubrovnik, a simple cosy hostel awaiting us - so we thought. We arrived to find the hostel overbooked and told to go to another building on the other side of town. An hour wandering through the beautiful city led us down a dark empty alley, to a building without a name or number: our new home, hostel, or in reality, a random flat. A disheveled looking man opened the door and showed us to a room. There was no reception or check in and throughout the night people arrived, confused as we were, but there wasn’t enough space - everyone took other people’s beds, who returned angry and arguing! It was a disorganised mess! The strangeness peaked when we returned one day to find a mysterious handwritten note on our bed from the unknown owner - an unconventional way of getting in touch - demanding that we finally pay. The whole situation was a little shady and completely random.
Most times it’s not so sketchy and there are some beautiful quirky hostels out there; an ex-prison in Ljubljana or a huge 50 person tent in Munich. It’s always a game of luck - you could have the best time of your life or you could be running away the next day, but you are always guaranteed a memorable time.
Perhaps my most interesting stay in a hostel was my time in Lucerne, Switzerland with my boyfriend. We had booked the hostel in a bit of a mad rush, not really checking where or what it was until we got there. However, when we arrived off the train in the morning, half-asleep and starving, we were somewhat startled to realise we had booked a stay in some random guy’s house.
We were sent some further information through WhatsApp, letting us know that the Airbnb was a short bus ride from the centre, with details on which bus to take, and when to get off. We obliged and found ourselves in the extremely posh (and uphill) Swiss suburbs. After an embarrassing amount of time lugging backpacks around in circles, we were greeted by the lovely Rainer, a surprisingly young live production engineer with a wealth of knowledge about the surrounding areas and a genuinely friendly disposition.
We were shown around the house, complete with a jacuzzi and breath-taking views, which we were sharing with about fifteen other people from all over the world. Everyone was unbelievably friendly, and people seemed to drift in and out of the house as you would your family home – we ate dinner together and chatted around the table about who we were and where we were going. Weirdly enough, it felt homely. It was like we were the most dysfunctional, random family ever, but it just worked somehow.
In my final year of school (Y11), I went on a ski trip and one morning I had a diabetic fit. I cannot even begin to imagine what my friends thought when they found me. Luckily they went to get the teachers and everything was fine; however, I was on a top bunk of a bunk bed and they had poured sugar into my mouth.
At this point, I will say that I laughed about this at the time and I still do now. The fit was scary for those around but I'm writing specifically about the aftermath of the fit and what it has to do with the hostel itself.
There was a lot, and I mean a lot, of sugar in my bed as well as some of my medication too from teachers trying to help me. The bedding was a mess. I asked repeatedly for hours, before I went on to the ski slopes in the afternoon, if they could sort it out. Did they? Course not.
My teachers also tried for me. By 1am the next night, I had new bedding. Though the mattress was still covered in sugar and the girl in the bed below me kept getting sugar dropped on to her every time I rolled over... I found this high entertainment when the only entertainment we had was our phones if our data worked abroad and gossiping about our lives to each other.