Living in hostels
We stayed in hostels while travelling through Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Here's a quick recap of my experiences with them.
Plumbing has always been a pivotal issue for me when evaluating places to stay and this is equally true with hostels. While I'm generally capable of sleeping on any reasonably soft horizontal surface if the lights are out and nobody is talking, I cringe at the thought of using a toilet or shower that is breeding new forms of life or lacks decent water pressure. I'm also finicky about having hot water on demand and being able to control the temperature easily. So I definitely appreciate good bathrooms in hostels. Fortunately I was not disappointed by any of the three at which we stayed. We slept in bunk beds in all three hostels and I always took the top one because Eliza was mildly concerned about falling out and I like climbing. In Romania we shared a large dorm room with several others but noise was never an issue. In Bulgaria we were assigned to a 4-person room but nobody else ever turned up so we effectively had a private room, which was great. In Turkey we ended up sharing a 4-person room with a middle-aged French couple who proved to be the worst shower hogs I've ever met but at least they didn't disturb us while we slept. Although I brought the OLPC XO with me, it's track record at using wifi was most discouraging so we tried to pick hostels that offered a shared computer from which to get our Internet fixes while travelling. In Romania the computer worked just fine when I used it but there was often a lot of contention for it due to the number of people staying at the hostel. In Bulgaria the computer worked fine the first day but subsequently got infected by a virus and couldn;t access Bulgarian websites. You wouldn't think this'd be a problem for us, except that teh Googles has an annoying habit of automatically redirecting browsers to the local version of their home page. At least we were able to use Facebook. In Turkey we randomly ditched the hostel we booked because nobody was at the front desk to check us in and ended up staying in a nearby hostel whose proprietor seemed nice. They didn't have a computer for guests but he was happy to let us use his, although on the 2nd day his DSL connection went down and it didn't start working again until the day we left. One of the advantages of hostel accommodations is the company. We met some pretty interesting people while hanging out at the hostel in both Romania and Bulgaria, although not so much in Turkey. I noticed that just about every British traveller seems to smoke, despite that not being the case when I was in London itself. Perhaps the particular demographic of Britons who tend to stay in hostels has a proclivity for smoking. It was also interesting to talk to travellers form other European countries, nearly all of whom spoke English fairly well. At the beginning of the trip we were both pretty worried about being robbed but the atmosphere at every hostel we stayed in made me feel pretty relaxed about that, although we did use lockers when in the dorm room in Romania. Most hostels frown upon bringing outside guests over so, despite the high guest turnover, you do get a moderate sense of familiarity with the faces around you. After my disheartening discovery that Budapest does not have laundromats, I was overjoyed to discover that the hostel in Romania would actually do our laundry for us at no additional charge and jumped at the offer. In the end I had to spend a fair amount of time disentangling my clothes from the pile of clean clothes they dumped on a table and I did lose one shirt - fortunately not one I was particularly fond of - but it was nice to have clean clothes again. Eliza, not being as lazy as me, just hand-washed her clothes everywhere. I actually ended up buying some new clothes in Bulgaria and Turkey, which allowed me to make it back to London without having to hunt for a laundromat again!
