Upsides/pros of hostel life

Communal area in the hostel in Wroclaw. Facilities per se were average/above par (coffee maker was EXCELLENT), reception people were pretty subpar, while my roommates were phenomenal and definitely some of the ones I had in mind when writing point number 2.

I owe some of my best travelling experiences to the people I met. Most of those people were the ones I hostelled with, since I usually had my mp3 player permanently plugged in my ears when travelling, which in itself is also a form of self-defense: in all my travels, with the exception of Romania, I've never EVER had a person on the streets ask me for money/food/seriously harass me.

But yes, back to the subject of hostels. Which is why I've decided to dedicate a whole entry to the upsides of staying in hostels. I started this entry wanting to list both the pros and cons but realised after the first one that this would be too meaty I was too lazy sooooo here goes, the upsides.

• Saves a lot of money, especially if you're travelling on a budget, which you probably are. I stayed in Prague in a relatively good district, 10 mins from the city centre, for - get this - 7 euros for 3 nights. That's 7 euros in total, not 7 euro per night. I'm not kidding, I swear. It was the PLUS hostel, a chain hostel with branches in Berlin, Rome and London (and more I think but these are the ones I remember). They had a discount special going on which I was lucky enough to stumble on. It was also one of the best hostels I stayed in for my continental#4 trip which is rather astonishing proof to the fact that more money does not always equal better quality. This was the only hostel I stayed in which provided a microwave for each bedroom (which had 4 people). That and the fact that we had our own ensuite toilets and showers rather than having to share those horrid public ones with the whole corridor/level. Eurgh no THANKS.

• The people you meet. This really goes without saying and has been covered tirelessly by the million other backpacker bloggers out there but I really have to include this. There are plenty of days when you get tired of talking to people and you really come back exhausted and want nothing but a good night's sleep. There are loads of days when your hostel roommates are a lot older than you/don't look like interesting people to talk to (whoops I said it but yes you do meet heaps of boring people contrary to popular opinion!)/don't speak proper English (probably should not have said that either). But then there are the days when you walk into a room, or you see your new roommate walk into a room, your eyes all simultaneously meet, you introduce yourselves, and you hit it off just like that. These moments are still relatively rare for me since I can be very picky with people, but when they do you're in seventh heaven and you spend all your stay with that person/those people, talking and talking. Nothing feels as amazing as that connection you feel with these serendipitous hostel roommates whom you only just met, yet whom you understand/feel understood by better than anyone else in your real life. I live for these moments. An earlier entry I wrote back in June said that I travelled because I wanted to find the people I fell in love with before, and I still think that rings true after a month of hostelling in Central/Eastern Europe - more than ever, as a matter of fact. And it's not even your hostel roommates who end up becoming some of the best people you ever meet. I've met quite a few amazing people who worked at the hostels and ended up becoming great friends with them.

• Usually makes your trip planning a lot less complicated (if you're a newb and are going for some of the more famous/touristy sights) if you just ask the reception how to get to certain places. During continental #1, I planned my whole trip to a tee, how to get there from the hostel by which bus on which side of the road, which stop to get off and which direction to walk for how many metres..you get the idea. Very time consuming, not to mention the fact that it's really much harder to get an idea of how to control your time/deal with the terrain if you're sitting in front of your laptop hundreds of kilometres away from your destination. Everything's a lot easier when you actually get there, and you can just ask the hostel people how to get to your place. Actually, you don't even have to ask the hostel people, you can just ask your roomies since there's a 99 percent chance they're going/have already gone there and everyone in the room will be very happy to help you. If you're all in the mood, you even end up going together. An example I can think of right off the top of my head is the hostel I stayed in Fussen, Germany. where everyone was obviously going to the Neuschwanstein castles. This was why I spent a lot less time on my itinerary this time round, apart from the fact that I wasn't a newb any more - I left all these pernickety smaller details to the hostel people. Great way to make new friends as well by the way which brings us back to #2. Of course, there was this one time where the hostel gave me directions but neglected to mention that the bus I was supposed to catch didn't run on a Sunday. Spoiler: Yeah it was a Sunday the day I went. I ended up wasting a whole morning, wasting a bus ticket and having to buy a new one, doing lots and lots of unnecessary running, and having to rush through a sightseeing spot much to my annoyance. Still, out of the 16 cities/towns I went to and countless places I visited, one out of all of that seems like very good odds. 

This seems like all of it for now. When I was writing this entry I noticed that there was so much more I wanted to say about hostels, yet which didn't really fall within the "upside" category, as it were. I'd like to write one on "Things to know/do/prepare before hostelling" and "Six degrees of hostelling - ie the OMFG THERE'S A POWER SOCKET FOR EACH BUNK THEREFORE MY LIFE IS COMPLETE!!" This one happens to me every hostel. Similar to the, "There's only the top bunk left? Well FUCK THAT."