Our accommodations over spring break were wide and varied. We stayed in hostels, hotels, guesthouses, and airports. It’s really amazing the different experiences we were able to have, good and bad. In Venice we stayed in a legit hotel, with a nice free breakfast that we took advantage of every morning. In Rome we stayed in a Maison, which we didn’t realize was pretty much just an apartment refurbished to serve guests; it was on the third floor of a residential building and had three private rooms that shared two bathrooms, and a kitchen/office area. Our best stay for the value was in Mallorca, where we stayed in a super cheap hotel (50 euro total for the two of us for two nights) that was minimalistic but clean with a private bathroom and a great location—we even had a tiny balcony from which you could see the sea!
The rest of the time we stayed in hostels, of varying degrees of livability. The Palermo hostel was the worst. It didn’t have any hot water, was kind of dirty, and I was terrified the whole night that the two wooden slats holding my mattress up would break and I’d fall on Kelli and kill her in the middle of the night…others were actually really nice, even if we did have to share a room with strangers. Ours in Sevilla had great water pressure, unlimited hot water, was super clean, and incredibly well-located, a few minutes walk from the Cathedral, the Plaza de Toros, etc. They even gave us free sandwiches as long as we were guests. Madrid hostel was nice too—hot water, breakfast with real nutella, a nice lounge and multiple computers with free internet. It’s funny that all the hostels offered free internet access while the hotels wanted to charge you…We also quickly learned that the best and most important sign of a good hostel is an abundance of hot water—without it, you will never be able to be clean, and therefore the hostel probably won’t be clean, since it’s filled with dirty backpackers.
The people you meet in hostels just astound me. It’s really amazing to talk with them, because they all have been traveling and seen amazing things too, and they can share their stories with you. The most common introductory format was, “Hi, I’m ____, I’m from _____ but I study/live/work in _____”. I’m from Pittsburgh studying in Florence but I’m in Sicily meeting my long-lost relatives. I go to Tulane but am studying in Prague. I’m from China but I’ve been working in Finland for the past four months. I’m from Brazil, studying in Portugal. I’m from Costa Rica, studying in France. I’m from Australia, on 60 day holiday from med school. There are so many more, and it’s crazy. And of course, you meet people who have been where you’ve been or studied where you studied, or who knows someone in Greece or has a friend in Athens….instant friends. It’s such an eclectic group of people that all come together because of a shared interest in travel and a shared lack of money.
Our final type of place to stay was no where—five out of our fifteen days, in order to save money, we didn’t book a hotel. Three nights we slept in the airport, one night we stayed out all night, and one night we spent on a bus from Sevilla to Madrid. We had many jokes about our hobo lifestyle and our lack of a home, carrying everything we owned for two weeks on our back. Sleeping in airports was terrible—it was always freezing, and only once did we get an actual bench, which we took for granted at the time. Our flights were early enough in the morning, though, that it didn’t make sense to have a hotel. There were usually one or two other people doing the same thing, but in Madrid it was ridiculous—we got there at 12:30 and the floor was littered with people; we couldn’t find open benches or even wall space! And these people were pros—there were backpackers who had rolled out their sleeping bags, people who had pushed together trolleys to make a bed…we felt like we were in some kind of hobo village.
My bed in Palermo—comfy! Also, in that backpack is everything I had for two weeks of travel, weighing in at 7.62 kilos when I left (and 9.75 when I got back…)
Photos from the hobo village around 12:45—by 2:00AM it was so crowded and noisy you would have thought it was midday, and they didn’t even start to open the check-in counters until 4:30!
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