from sweet Nic:
lovely members of the audience, i feel that it is my duty to discuss The Hostel with you..... this is not our hostel necessarily (although the examples will be from my most recent experiences).... rather, i am choosing to discuss The Hostel as one would The Good or The Beautiful.... as a greater, all-encompassing idea.......
so... on hostels, by...
Note 1 - our hostel was very nice considering it was a mere �7 per night, including breakfast (the world's sickest breakfast, but it's the thought, isn't it?)
Note 2 - your brain registers where you are regardless of its state. i was somewhere close to coma on our first night here when i got out of bed to use the facilities (fitting name for what we had as they were - honestly - no more than facilities). as i was walking back into our darkened room, i found myself face to whiskey-faced with a very tall, very broad, very bald man. he blinked and panted slightly in my direction, and in a slightly less functional state as i'm sure i got mildly tipsy from the fumes, i said a quiet "excuse me" and shifted passed him to my bed. now, were this real life (or at least, the real life that i like to pretend i lead), little nicola brooke would have sprung into action... with a blood-curdling, life-threatening, spine-twisting scream, she would have flown to the air... she would have kicked, bitten, hit, scratched.... basically, she would have flattened any scary, bald, drunk man that had arrived in her room and was trying to stare her in the face in the middle of the night. but your brain knows to expect these things when you're in a hostel.
Note 3 - you can't control who you room with when you go with the cheapest option in the cheapest hostel. you may find yourselves trying to sleep in the same room as the "arrogant, gay, half-naked, porn-reading, door-slamming, lecherous swedes"... or maybe that was just our luck.
Note 4 - you can tell a lot about a place from the type of diseases they make you worry about. i'm serious. in the hotel that emily and i stayed in in spain, for instance, you could slit open your thumb and run it around the inside of the toilet and the worst that would happen would be a slight sting and the disinfectant cleaned out your wound. only once (paris with gina) did i stay somewhere that made me wonder if you could catch aids from breathing too hard. our hostel (in bayswater) was somewhere near "skin lice" .... oddly enough, both of us discovered a few itchy spots in the first day or two .... then again, that may have been the plane, which seriously made me think of fleas.
