hostel life ... and prisons

I really like staying in hostels.  This is not just about saving money, but more for the social factor – even if I were to win the big prize on the Premium Bonds, I think I’d still stay in hostels, albeit with the occasional night or two in a private room (space to unpack, dry laundry and repack, less disturbances to my sleep, etc).

But sometimes it can be a strange experience, at least if you always stay in the cheapest hostel in town, as I do.  I’m quite relaxed about the state of cleanliness, but was still surprised to get a bed twice in the last six weeks, once in Lithuania and once in Latvia, with unwashed bed linen.  In the first instance, there was only a weekly visit of a cleaner, who apparently (I didn’t see her) did a cursory sweep and restocked toilet paper and washing up liquid – but she didn’t do any laundry.  Most of the occupants were there for quite a while (immigrants either looking for work or already doing low-paid jobs) and so put their own bedding through a wash when required, but of course nobody did that for the other beds – those occupied by people like me who only passed through for a few days.

In the second instance, I think beds were usually stripped when a guest left, but the other lady in my tiny (two-person) room had moved out of the top bunk and into the clean lower bunk after its previous occupant moved out.  Thankfully she was moved into a different room on my second day, after I shared with the manager one example of her bizarre behaviour (she left our door wide open when she went – after me – to bed, which given that we were the first room next to the social area meant full volume conversations, laughter, arguments, etc from other guests; after an hour or so of this, I looked down to see if she was still awake and asked if I could close the door.  She said I could, but that she would go and open it again!).  He told me that she seemed to be mentally disturbed, backed up by later very odd behaviour I saw from her.

This hostel was full of unusual guests – many from India, Pakistan and Yemen, also one from Afghanistan and one from Ukraine, the latter with boxes full of food (supposedly a three-month supply) given by the government to Ukrainian refugees.  I was involved in a few interesting conversations and was invited to a delicious meal cooked by one of the Yemenis, who’d worked for some time as a chef whilst in exile in Saudi Arabia.  I’m not sure of the legal status in Latvia of these people, although one, who’d apparently only just come out of jail, was taken away by police one morning as things had got a bit violent after he was reported to the manager as drunkenly vomiting into the sink in the kitchenette area!  But even the less ‘exotic’ guests could be interesting, such as the German lady who moved into the bunk below me and immediately started talking about her travels to Mali – wow, I rarely meet anyone who has been there (my favourite country)!

Following this ‘interesting’ hostel in Riga, it turned out to be a little anti-climactic to spend the night in a cell in a former Soviet prison (Karosta Prison in Liepaja) … my own room, clean bedding, no loud noises from the corridor outside, no police in arresting other travellers…

I’d heard about this place from a room-mate in Lithuania, and added it straight to my plans.  But they had invited local artists to decorate a few of the cells (painting the walls), and given these an arty bedside table and a comfortable chair, and it was these cells they used for guests.  Plus we were free to turn on and off our light at whatever time we wished (I had expected a ‘lights out’ order), and to spend as long as required in the toilets (apparently inmates had been restricted to two visits a day, each for a maximum of 19 seconds!).  So not such an authentic experience as I’d hoped for.  But after posting my ‘insufficiently authentic’ review on the booking site, I skimmed through the other reviews, to see the majority saying the opposite – sparse furnishing in the cell, having to use shared bathrooms, shock, horror!!  To me, of course, my way of travelling is normal, as all of the other travellers I meet (when socialising in my hostel) also travel this way – but reading the prison reviews highlights how abnormal it is for the majority who stay in smart hotels when they travel!