There’s a cool Portuguese expression called saudade that doesn’t have a direct translation into English. From what I understand it describes a feeling of longing for someone you miss, although it can also express nostalgia for an experience you’ve never actually had. Maybe saudade is what I’ve felt about the backpacking trip across Europe that I didn’t get around to taking after college, first because I didn’t have enough money, then because I didn’t have enough time. Like many of my generation (I went to college with Cheryl Strayed), I considered that kind of adventure to be the epitome of a well-spent youth, an opportunity to be rugged, worldly and independent.
During my bouts of saudade, I long for memories of finishing Sons and Lovers on an overnight ferry between the Greek Islands, going to a fire dance in Bulgaria, falling in love with a stranger on a train and “finding myself” while wandering through narrow, cobblestone-covered streets in battered Tevas. I wish I’d sunbathed on topless beaches before my body was blown out by pregnancy, and spent my nights at Bohemian sidewalk cafes having intense discussions about Kirkegaard back when those conversations would have been interesting and cool instead of pretentious and boring. Mostly, I’ve longed to stay in a youth hostel, because that seemed to be the quintessential element of every young, broke European adventure.
This past summer I had a chance to visit Lisbon for two weeks to attend a writing conference. One of my kids is eighteen now, and the other one goes to summer camp. For the first time since having children, two weeks away on my own on the other side of the ocean was a real possibility. The organizers presented us with an array of lodging options, from expensive hotels to airbnb rentals. When they told me I could share a room in a youth hostel, I jumped at the chance. A hostel sounded fun and social. More than that, it was an opportunity for me to live out a portion of my unfulfilled travel fantasy and replace imagined memories with real ones – or to exchange my saudade for nostalgia.
This hostel sounded a lot nicer than the stark, barracks-style rooms that I’d imagined. It was right in the heart of the city, and touted as one of the best in all of Europe, like the hostel version of the W Hotel, featuring housecleaners who changed your sheets every third day and theme rooms decorated by professional designers.
When I arrived, travel-weary, I rang the buzzer and lugged my big bag up two flights of marble steps into the lobby. It was even cooler than the photos on the web site and the descriptions on the five-star Trip Advisor reviews. There were two long tables where people who looked like baristas on vacation played cards and typed on their computers. Funky lounge music thumped out of the speakers. I poked around while waiting to get checked in. The reception area was decorated with a fainting couch and an old-fashioned barber’s chair. That morning’s breakfast was being cleaned up and put away in the kitchen. Another common room had some computers, a couch, a television, and a wall lined with videocassettes featuring movies in a dozen different languages. I discreetly looked for evidence of cockroaches and found none.
I checked in and was led to my room, up another two breathless floors. I passed a Nigerian man talking on the phone on the stairs, and saw a group of Dutch travelers reading books in the common areas. Someone on the third floor was listening to Reggae, and on the fourth floor I could hear a recording of chanting monks. People came and went. The place was alive, vibrant, and I felt young and hip just being there, no longer a mother in a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin driving my son to lacrosse practice or mowing the lawn. I was in Lisbon, and I was me, my most essential self, shaken loose from my life. I was in the world.
My roommate was already there, and I was relieved to see that she was about my age. She sat on a twin bed that was right next to another twin bed, so close that I worried I would wake the next morning to find her spooning me. We plunged into a manic discussion about who we were and where we were from and what we were going to work on at the conference, an experience that reminded me of meeting my college roommate for the first time. Here I was in Portugal, just an hour since I’d gotten off the plane, and I’d already I’d made a friend!
I wanted to unpack, but there weren’t any dressers, and I tried not to let that bug me, but it did. Couldn’t they at least provide us with hooks to hang our stuff? My roommate wore wigs and had no place to put them. They looked funny laid out on top of her bed, like housecats curled up for naps. So we’d be living out of our suitcases, but that was part of the experience, right? I reminded myself that I was a traveler, and travelers were supposed to be disheveled.
The opening reception was fun, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking about the proximity of the beds. What if I snored? What if she snored? What if she was a swinger, or a lesbian? What if she thought I was a swinger or a lesbian? I wondered if she’d change in front of me, or if I should just change in the tiny area outside the shower. My thoughts were totally prudish and uncool, and I chastised myself for having them. The whole point of my lodging choice was to show myself that I could roll with it, and I was already rolling on square wheels.
Much to my relief, my roommate was having the same uncool thoughts. When we returned, we agreed to deal with the “bed situation.” She moved her bed closer to the windows, and I pushed mine to the wall next to the door to our room, which was right across from both of the bathrooms, and between two rooms that slept six people. That night I’d learn that I would hear every footstep, hallway conversation, door closing, fart and flush of the toilet. To make matters worse, giant trucks and motorcycles rumbled outside, and the noise echoed off the concrete streets and merciless stone walls. It felt like everything was hard in Lisbon: my rock of a bed, the wood floors and the marble bathroom. Nothing muffled the sound.
It turned out that my age-appropriate roommate would suffer from a terrible combination of jetlag and night sweats. She might have only gotten up a few times, but it felt like she was up every five minutes, and every time she rose, I’d stir, and because I stirred, she thought that meant I was awake, and she’d start talking to me about her sinuses, perimenopause, the story she was working on, and hegemony.
I couldn’t function the next day, or any day after that. I went to my workshops with puffy eyes, unable to focus on the conversation. Instead of exploring Lisbon during our free afternoons, I went back to the hostel to try to nap, praying every time I opened the door that my roommate wouldn’t be in the room, not because I didn’t want to see her, but because I needed rest. Even if she was gone, sleep was elusive. My biorhythm was so messed up and I was so focused on sleep that I’d lie in bed and nothing would happen. Or I’d start to drift off and a worker would run the vacuum or a plumber would bang away at the broken showers and toilets. It seemed something was always broken. Motorcycles and garbage trucks grumbled through the canyon of buildings outside. They must pick up garbage ten times a day in Lisbon.
At night, my roommate would stay up late typing on her computer, and I’d notice that she rocked back and forth in the bed while she typed, and she chewed gum. I am a person with a lot of pet peeves, most of them centered around breathing and mouth noises, and I should have factored this into my decision to share a room with a stranger. I tried to work against my own nature. I told myself that we were at a writing conference after all, and there was nothing wrong with her getting work done in the comfort of our room. She was perfectly entitled to her gum, which she chewed quietly, and I probably make a lot of my own noises, so who am I to judge… it didn’t work. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like she typed like she was playing a Bach fugue on her keyboard. Every squeak of her bedspring and every chomp of her gum shredded my nerves.
I could have asked her to work in the lounge or put her computer away. It was one in the morning and that was a perfectly reasonable request. My roommate was nice and I’m sure she would have obliged, but I said nothing, which led me to wonder: why, at my age, was I still so meek? World travelers, the kind who stay in hostels, are supposed to be confident and assertive. Instead, I rolled around on my hard bed, wincing at my hip pointer and jammed up shoulder. I put on my too-tight headphones and tried to listen to waves crash on the white noise application I’d downloaded on my phone, and finally sleep came… until the group of six people sharing a room next door stumbled back from the bars, one at a time, every twenty minutes like they were rolling off a rotisserie. Their conversations were loud, hilarious, and tearful, and I could hear every single word they said to the soundtrack of the crashing waves. I finally fell asleep again, only to wake to someone barfing.
I hated everyone at breakfast. They all looked rested. They were actually enjoying their vacations. Even the sixty-ish woman smiled and held court with the hipsters, as happy and fresh as a summer day. What was wrong with me? Why was I seemingly the only person who was miserable in the hostel? People talked about plans to visit the castles in Sintra or meet up at a bar later that night. Me? I only wanted to do one thing on my fabulous conference/vacation adventure I’d been planning for months: sleep. I hadn’t been this tired and cranky since my children were infants, an experience that made me covet my sleep, and one I never thought I’d ever voluntarily repeat.
The girl who wrote paranormal erotica tried to strike up a conversation with me but I could hardly string a sentence together. Another girl who made me feel like a dorm mother when she cried on my shoulder because her boyfriend broke up with her told me she thought that this time, it really was over, and I tried to seem sympathetic.
I wanted to do laundry almost as much as I wanted to sleep. Like the showers and toilets, the hostel washing machine had been broken all week, and I was on my last pair of underwear. Tinkerbell at the front desk with the pixi haircut and Roman sandals looked at me flatly when I checked the status. She said they couldn’t decide if they should order the new part or buy a new machine. I wanted to say: decide already! You’re running a business! You have forty or so people here every night, and when the washing machine breaks, you take care of it. I wanted to lecture them about how I ran my own household, but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to sound like the entitled prima donna I didn’t realize I’d become after all my years staying in actual hotels. What happened to me? I’d grown soft. Spoiled. I was old and boring, even though one of the young girls in the hostel told me I didn’t “throw off an old vibe.”
So I walked across the city with my clothes in a plastic bag to find the Laundromat, my pocket heavy with jingling Euros, feeling resentful of the hostel, myself, and life. I may as well have stayed home if I wanted to spend a day doing laundry. That’s when I decided I would leave. I couldn’t get my money back, and I didn’t care. I found a hotel with twin beds that was even less expensive than what my roommate and I were paying for the hostel, and I booked it without hesitation. When I checked out, the guy at the desk asked if there was something wrong with my stay, not knowing that I’d be the only person on the planet to give them less than a five-star review on Trip Advisor.
“I can’t sleep,” I said, and it felt like a giant confession. I almost started to cry.
He shrugged. “This is hostel. It happens.”
My new hotel was perfect, quiet and full of charm, tucked away in the old Moorish part of the city. It had a purple chandelier and thick curtains and a window with a beautiful view of the river. I felt like a character straight out of an EM Forester novel. I had a dresser! And hooks! I set my luggage on the empty twin bed nobody else would sleep in. I unpacked, and then I did something amazing: I slept.
One of my neighbors once told me a story about a garage sale he’d had when he decided to sell his rollerblades, racing bike and cross-country skis. He said it was a bigger deal than just letting go of his possessions; it made him acknowledge that he’d never be able to use his sports equipment again. Then he said, “That was when it hit me: I wasn’t just old. I was elderly.” Our lives are made up of these unexpected moments of clarity when we realize we’ve stumbled across a threshold from one stage of life to the next, and we are forced to acknowledge the new set of limits. That’s how I felt when I walked across Lisbon with my laundry in my arms and realized that my hostel days had gone the way of the miniskirt, dance clubs and Lollapalooza.
But saudade is a complicated emotion, and there was more to it – something about timing, and doing things (or not doing things) when they matter most to you. And then there was that nagging feeling that it wasn’t just a lack of money and time that had kept me from traveling across Europe with a backpack when I was younger. I was terrified I’d be robbed or raped, and I’ve never been good with strong personalities and cramped quarters and the slightest chance of bedbugs. I have a magnet on my refrigerator that says: “Thank God I’m not camping.” Would I ever really have gone backpacking when I could have? I doubt it.
So how come I wanted to stay at the hostel? Why am I so out of touch with who I am? I blame it on my bad case of saudade. I didn’t just long for an experience I’d never had, but I also desired to live life as the carefree, easy, adventuresome and fearless person I’ve never been. I thought these longings were negative, but when I replaced my saudade with nostalgia, I recognized saudade as the kind of emotional balm Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo described as: “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” Saudade made me feel like I did those things I never did, or could have done them, and that I also could have been the person I never was. Saudade made me feel like my past and my personality were expansive – that is, until I tried to cure myself of it.
Tags: christi clancy, hostels, the butter, travel
I didn’t go to college and twice, managed to scrape together enough of my tips to travel internationally. My traveling friend and I stayed in a LOT of hostels. Probably the worst night was in Barcelona in a room with about 11-15 other people and we were all sleeping in what were essentially metal boxes. The night we splurged on room price was the night in which it was me, my friend, and just two other people. Luxury!
While I can assure you (and you know this now, of course) that you missed nothing, I admit to having a bit of false nostalgia for the trip *I* never took–the cross-country US road trip. About to do it in less than a year but with a husband and two cats, so not super romantic and no camping/backpacking possible.
My most recent hostel antidote involved staying in one huge loft room that had been set up with maybe a dozen bunkbeds. Cheap and everyone was surprisingly quiet… until around 6am, when a new person came in wearing what sounded like tap shoes begging for earplugs. Despite everyone in the room wanting to murder him, he eventually got what he wanted and proceeded to collapse into the bottom bunk of the bed I was in. When I couldn’t stand it any more I climbed down and discovered my bunk mate was dressed in full Vampire Ball gear: blood red tail coat, ruffled white shirt, LEATHER PANTS and giant boots with metal toes (which were the source of the tapping).
He later said he “hadn’t slept for four days” and had only a small sausage-roll of bedding, which meant that however long he’d been traveling, those were his ONLY CLOTHES! I desperately wanted to ask him what he had been doing during that time, but I had a bus to catch. : /
Oh my gosh! Now I really want to know, too! Perhaps he was an extra in a vampire movie and then was robbed while on his lunch break?
I’ve seriously thought of posting a Craigslist ad or something just to get the back story. “WERE YOU A STRANDED VAMPIRE TWO YEARS AGO?”
I toured Europe with my family of 6 while we were living in germany- not a “find yourself” trip as much as a “find your brother where is he I thought you had him” kind of trip. Our lodgings consisted of 6 rollaway beds shoved together to make a sort of platform. I blame my siblings’ crazy close relationship to me on the fact we were usually the only ones we could talk to. Like the time we reserved SPACE on the train, but not SEATS, and ended up in the hallway of a bullet train for 6 hours.
“Find your Brother” could be the title of my childhood memoirs, if I ever write it. We’re a family of 10-ish and went to Europe a couple times.
This was great. Hope you’re happy and rested! Once I realized I felt too old for hostels I’ve never looked back. Especially when the difference in price between hostel and hotel equates to only $10USD or so per night – I’m so happy to shell out a bit more for my own space.
Yes, it was exciting to finally have that money to not have to stay at a hostel but a real, if shitty, hotel room.
Can I feel that way about AirBnB places? I’ve had nice experiences and then the nonsense ones (“oh yeah there is totally wi-fi.. by which we mean if you stand in the further corner you may be able to pick up the fastfood place next door”) and was just all around a “we uh… could have probably paid $20 extra to stay in motel 6, and we wouldn’t have had to bring our own sheets, either” feeling.
I know how you feel… lol! I’m managing a property listed on AirBnB ( not mine, just managing). And what you said is true to some properties I managed.. total bummer!
Man this hits home. I DID have all the romantic youthful hostel experiences, and the fact that I no longer would have the interest or energy to do that again makes me really sad sometimes. Like, my best friend and I stayed in a hostel in Lima and made friends with everyone in our six-bed room, one of whom is still a good friend of ours today, and on New Years Eve we went out and met some rich kids who were traveling with their family who brought us all back to the “Lima Country Club”, and me and BFF and some random Australians all woke up on New Years Day in this bizarre Peruvian Country Club. It was amazing. . .and now I get a headache if I drink more than two beers in a night and I just love going to bed at 10pm. There are so many other things in my life that I deeply appreciate that I didn’t appreciate as much then, but it still just makes me feel weird and sad sometimes that I may never have that spontaneous and nuts a night again. And I don’t like the feeling of my experiences turning into nostalgic stories about my youth, yknow? Anyways tl;dr I enjoyed this piece a lot.
For what it’s worth, I felt the same way about hostels when I was twenty years old. After the first hostel trip, I never stayed in a shared room with anyone I didn’t know again.
This piece hits close to home! A few years ago my mother and I did a riding trek that involved some fairly basic camping, and she held up like a trooper, but when we were safely back in the land of showers and maid service, she said firmly, “I’m glad that we did that, and I don’t want to do it again.”
I walked past a couple of Edinburgh’s hostels this week and felt a great relief that I hadn’t even considered them as options. I too wish I’d been more youth-travel-flexy, but I wasn’t, and it’s fine.
I can relate to this so hard! Whenever I start getting sad about all the partying/drinking/dancing I didn’t do in college, I have to remind myself that what I did do in college was what I wanted to do; i.e., not drink and dance and party. That’s just who I am!
I loved this, any crack about hegemony will get me every time, but I join the crowd in saying, I am a total extrovert who did that kind of crazy kooky travel, and realized by 25 that a good hotel with nice beds and breakfast buffet was not to be sneered at….
My own youth hostel experiences include a kangaroo, a naked man, a roommate who refused to share the bunk bed so I had to share a bed with my friend, a schizophrenic roommate, a boat race, the police, the original Happiness Hotel, the same man in my room in two different hostels, an introduction to Burning Man, milking goats, a Hollywood mansion, a room with no beds, a convent/Olympic rehab hospital/hostel, and many beautiful and interesting people. Anyway, for a sheltered girl they were a wonderful education. I will encourage my kids to stay in them but make sure they have a credit card just in case they need to leave in the middle of the night (looking at you, Seattle).
Oooo … I love this … my list includes a powerful headache produced by a shower head that fell off and hit *me* on the head; a man dressed as a chicken chasing me and two other girls I’d met at my hostel through the streets of Paris shouting “Attends, attends!” (“Wait, wait!”) because he wanted to kiss us; my best friend getting into her laundry bag and wearing it as a skirt; American teenagers shouting obscenities at 2 a.m. in the hallway; nuns who ran a hostel on the same street as a bunch of sex shops; a very charming boy who made me tea; floating down a Czech river in inner tubes; mattresses on the floor in an Italian villa formerly owned by an opera star; a little girl wearing a viking helmet at dinner; an attack of giggles over leather pants; bedbugs; a roommate whose extra-loud squeaky-farting-style snores drove me to sleep on the hostel’s living room couch; every possible sort of breakfast, from none to terrible to amazing. And yes, a great education.
I travel a lot internationally for work and always stay in nice business hotels. If I take some personal days in the city, I stay in a hostel for a couple of days. It’s always much easier coming to a hostel after maid service and nice showers.
Oh, this resonates. The one and only time I stayed in a hostel, I was in my late twenties and found myself unexpectedly stranded in Çanakkale, Turkey. I had virtuously said “thanks but no thanks” to the expensive hotel nearby (nearly $100 a night, horrors!) and since it was the off-season, i.e. nowhere near Anzac Day and at a time of year when you really want to be vacationing in Sweden rather than Turkey, the Anzac Hostel ran me only a few bucks and I managed to have a room with two bunk beds to myself. “Aw man,” I thought, “what kind of hostel experience is this? Not a Dutch student or a Australian backpacker in sight with whom to strike up an impromptu friendship and drink cheap Turkish beer until the crack of dawn!”
I was glad to have that room to myself and a lock on the door that night, because it didn’t cool down any overnight and there was only a small window at ceiling level. Not even a fan. I cannot imagine the hell of having three other people in that room. I would have had to put pajamas on, for gosh sakes.
Hold up – “what if she was a lesbian”? What does that even mean? I hate to criticize something that appears on the Toast, but that’s the kind of statement that really needs to be unpacked, not just waved away as “oh, yes, I’m a prude to be worried about a lesbian sleeping next to me”.
I, a queer woman, have slept next to many straight women – even shared a double bed with one for a whole broke summer! – and…uh…nothing happened. More, I’ve slept next to queer women in various situations and nothing happened.
I find myself curious as to what you think would have happened if your roommate had been a lesbian? She would have mauled you in your sleep? She would have spooned you? She would have leered at you? What?
Yeah this struck me as pretty gross and unfair. Not what I expect to read on a usually queer-friendly site like The Toast. Feeling threatened by the possibility of sharing a room with a lesbian isn’t “prudish”, it’s just plain homophobic.
I have been scrolling through the comments fervently praying someone would bring this up, because my faith in the Toast would have been irrevocably damaged if no-one did. I’m used to this kind of casual homophobia literally everywhere else, but not here.
Guess what, the vast majority of lesbians have a perfectly concept of social norms and boundaries and even on the off chance they might be attracted to you, they will almost definitely not try and assault you, because they are regular people and not rabid sex demons. JFC.
Yeah I definitely heard a big ol’ record screech at that too.
She did acknowledge that her unbidden thoughts were inappropriate, although she could have phrased it more strongly.
Much much more strongly. “Prudish and uncool” is a far cry from “blatantly homophobic and I better start teaching myself.”
I’ve always been a poor sleeper, so even though hostels sounded romantic I always sort of knew they weren’t my thing. Even on my postgrad backpacking trip I stayed in cheap hotels that I booked in advance. Sometimes my room was so small they could barely cram a twin bed in there but it was always mine and mine alone. What I lacked in spontaneity I gained in getting enough rest that I actually remember the trip.
I've always been a poor sleeper, so even though hostels sounded romantic I always sort of knew they weren't my thing. Even on my postgrad backpacking trip I stayed in cheap hotels that I booked in advance. Sometimes my room was so small they could barely cram a twin bed in there but it was always mine and mine alone. What I lacked in spontaneity I gained in getting enough rest that I actually remember the trip.
Yeah, that rubbed me wrong too.
who’s EM Forester?
whoa, how did you do that? notice that typo? you must be like, one of the top ten smartest people alive. i’m really impressed!
I’ve only stayed in a dorm style hostel once, it was out of necessity and it was horrendous. When they said ‘dorm room’ I thought of like a long boarding school type dorm, not a regular sized bedroom with 4 bunk beds in it. I was traveling with my mother, who snores like a train but will usually shut up if you shout at her, and then this very large guy, who’d obviously had a few beers, was on the bunk below me. Sheer hell, mother would go for awhile then shut up, and there’d be 5 seconds of glorious peace, then big guy would kick off for the next hour. We had to get up at 6 am I literally had no sleep.
I’d happily take a room with friends for a few night, but I refuse to share with strangers. And you can usually get a single room in a hostel for <30 euro. I don’t mind the hard beds too much, and the basic facilities so long as I have my own space to retreat to. (And the hostel I stayed in in Berlin had a sink and hanging rail in the room, and a massive window!)
Friend of mine has been couchsurfing/hitchhiking around Europe and some of her stories are crazy; I get that we should be strong and independent, but hopping in strange mens cars and staying at their house on your own freaks me out. I can’t even take directions from strangers without getting defensive (Its a London habit I think)
I’ve definitely experienced this kind of feeling for things like albums and movies and books. Like, there’s a window in which it was appropriate for me to discover certain musicians and authors. Once I’m past that window, it doesn’t matter how much I want to like them. When I experience it for the first time now, it all just slides off me without making an impression. I’m going to put basically the entire Ani DiFranco catalog in this category, for example.
Toasties, how do you meet people on the road if you’re not staying at a hostel?? Husband and I recently upgraded from hostels to cheap hotels, but after a couple of weeks together we run out of stuff to say to one another and are desperate for other people to talk to. Ideas?
Trains and buses are good. I’ve had good vibes on day tours (Vietnam) and bars (Germany). This is a good way to meet locals. If you’re staying at a place that provides breakfast in a shared space, that’s good too.
If you are my sister, go ANYWHERE and wear a t-shirt with an 80s cartoon on it. Europe, Mexico, tourist places, small towns we’ve been in the US, it always goes like this:
literally everyone: “oh hey that is a great shirt, I loved that show”
My sister: “thanks, I love it too! have you been here before? Oh where are you from? What kind of cool things can you do there? Let me tell you about other cool things here or that I have heard about” and then she’ll have a great chatty conversation all because she wore a Ninja Turtles or Ducktales shirt that day.
My grandparents were great, sociable travelers and they met people everywhere – at the free breakfast in their hotel, on walking tours, in national parks, in museum gift shops, wherever. I have no idea how they did it but I think they just made friendly chit chat wherever they went. (I’m the opposite of a sociable traveler and my idea of a perfect breakfast at a hotel is one where no one talks to me).
A more practical thought – short walking tours are a good way to meet people because you end up walking next to different people you can chat with as you troop from site to site (I’m partial to ghost tours or architectural tours in cities and nature tours in parks but there are tons of options).
This brings back sooo many hostel memories, perhaps the best/worst of which is the joint attack of hysterics my best friend and I had in the bathroom of a hostel in Budapest. We had arrived on the train after a long trip, horribly hot and sticky (Hungary was having a heat wave) and when we FINALLY made it to the hostel and FINALLY FINALLY got to the women’s bathroom to take showers, some other girl was in there and wouldn’t let us in. It was a huge communal bathroom with several shower stalls, but she insisted on having the entire place to herself. I stuck my head in the men’s bathroom and discovered it was empty, so my best friend and I each got in a shower stall and started getting clean. Then some guy came into the room and we shrieked and yelled and told him he had to leave (I know, this sounds like it’s going to turn into a porno, but it doesn’t) and THEN I tried to adjust the temperature on my shower and the handle came off in my hand (or maybe this happened to my best friend? I can’t remember), and we both began to laugh in a way that felt truly, totally out of control. My dear friend, in the next shower over, said “We already paid for tonight, but tomorrow we are finding a HOTEL. Even if we have to put it on your parents’ credit card.” (The credit card was strictly for emergencies.) Instead, we ended up renting an inexpensive room in a pre-war apartment from a very sweet little old lady, who chattered away to us in Hungarian, of which we spoke not a single word. We had a very nice time in Budapest.
My grandparents were great, sociable travelers and they met people everywhere – at the free breakfast in their hotel, on walking tours, in national parks, in museum gift shops, wherever. I have no idea how they did it but I think they just made friendly chit chat wherever they went. (I'm the opposite of a sociable traveler and my idea of a perfect breakfast at a hotel is one where no one talks to me).
A more practical thought – short walking tours are a good way to meet people because you end up walking next to different people you can chat with as you troop from site to site (I'm partial to ghost tours or architectural tours in cities and nature tours in parks but there are tons of options).
This reminds me of a Sons of the Never Wrong song – “I like hotels” – which is an hilarious litany of all the things that can go wrong when a folk band goes on the road and stays with fans. (I don’t think they’ve recorded it – I saw it performed in Chicago and they joked they’d only play it to hometown audiences.)
This reminds me of a Sons of the Never Wrong song – "I like hotels" – which is an hilarious litany of all the things that can go wrong when a folk band goes on the road and stays with fans. (I don't think they've recorded it – I saw it performed in Chicago and they joked they'd only play it to hometown audiences.)
Much much more strongly. "Prudish and uncool" is a far cry from "blatantly homophobic and I better start teaching myself."
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