staying in hostels

When I’m travelling independently (ie not on a guided tour), I still stay in hostels.  Not just any hostels, but the cheapest one in my location, provided its location is okay and customer reviews do not refer to anything exceptionally bad, such as bed bugs.  (this is the review on bookingdotcom for the hostel I stayed at in Tirana for the last week:

Couldn't even spend one night there.

Scored 2.0

😊 the price.

☹ this hostel was really scary. there was no clear signage around - so it was difficult to find it. no locks on doors, no curtains on beds, no security, no reception, weird smell, scary vibe. We couldn't even stay the night because of how uncomfortable we felt.)

I do this for financial reasons, as the package tour part of my travel lifestyle can be pretty expensive so I need to ‘balance the books’.  But I also do so for the company – even if I won £1 million next month, I would still stay in hostels (although maybe with the very occasional night in a hotel with a decent swimming pool, where I could also get an uninterrupted night’s sleep without room-mates coming and going and sometimes snoring loudly, and a relaxed shower with no-one queuing to use it after me!).

One thing I’ve realised about the cheap end of the hostel market is that the other guests are usually not ‘normal’ people.  My hostel in Tirana (which has 90% male guests, mostly Asian and Muslim) was probably an extreme example, but during my week there before flying back to the UK, I had some quite deep conversations with three other guests – as you tend to, there’s little surface-level chitchat – the first was a VERY overweight Syrian guy, who’d left his home town of Aleppo in 2014, when it was suffering intense and deadly urban warfare between government forces and armed opposition groups, alongside the conflict against the Islamic State.  He had moved to a small town in Norway (an asylum case, I guess), where he’d set up as a chef.  He had learnt very little Norwegian (and no-one in his town speaks Arabic), his marriage had fallen apart, and he had turned to drink to dull the loneliness; I think his stay in Albania was in part to break the alcohol habit, but I’m not sure that it was working.  & I’m 99% certain it was him who stole my toilet bag (which thankfully I found – with one of his hand luggage bags – in an unlocked locker, although by then I had already replaced nail clippers, scissors, tweezers and toothbrush).

The next day I was talking to a Ukrainian, whose family had moved to Spain when he was eight and then in some way he didn’t want to talk about, treated him very badly, as a result of which he had moved to the UK.  He told me of his recent huge disappointment that the British authorities had turned down his application to become a British citizen – on the basis that he’d neglected to tell them of his criminal record.  He showed me their email, which referred to four criminal convictions … turns out they were only for drunkenness and associated misbehaviour (fights, etc), but he clearly still has an alcohol problem and is suffering from loneliness and a feeling of rejection.

Then today, I got into conversation with a pleasant and gentle-seeming guy from New Zealand, a keen traveller and not obviously suffering from any problems.  However, he shared his frustration that he cannot get a visa to visit a number of countries – including the UK – as a result of his criminal conviction!  Following a severely troubled traumatic childhood he was homeless and jobless, and (whilst drunk one night) he set fire to the woodpile, rubbish heap and a storage room at a school, for which he got a two-year prison sentence.  He later turned to religion, which had enabled him to come to terms with his past and to move on, and was now travelling as a missionary!

Wow … where would I meet such fascinating people if I lived a ‘normal’ life in London?

& … how would my hostel mates describe me if they were writing a post like this??!