Glancing at the NY Times Travel page today, I found this article about hostels and how they have changed. The writer of the article, Jennifer Conlin, a mom of 2 teenage girls, traveled around Europe with her daughters, staying in hostels along the way. She first explains her trepidation in this choice, as she remembers “with frightening clarity” the grittiness of the hostels she’d known as a college backpacker. Her daughters, she writes, have only stayed in nice hotels. She worries they will confront what she confronted years ago. Instead, she finds a “stylish, modern building with gleaming plate-glass windows.” There are flat screen TVs in the common room, which “could have been a model set for the Ikea catalog with brightly colored sofas and chairs arranged around sparkling white laminated tables.”
Let me stop things right here.
As a former college student, backpacker, and person in their 20s, I have stayed in many European hostels. Some have been great, some have been terrible. But, reading this article, I felt unhappy, like something was being lost. Hostels are great for price and convenience, but there’s something more. Hostels are supposed to be gritty. The whole point is that you’re not in some fancy hotel with shiny floors, or even in some crappy budget hotel with gray carpeted hallways and flickering lights. Hostels are waypoints, stopping places for travelers, a crossroads, if you will. (Now, I’m not talking about family trips here, with kids and parents and grandparents. That follows a different course).
Conlin, the article’s author, upon seeing the fancy hostels, wonders, “Where was the peeling paint? Why wasn’t laundry hanging from the windows? Why wasn’t there a drunken student passed out on the stoop?” She is glad not to find these things, but I am worried. With these things gone, it seems the spirit, the edginess of the hostel is gone as well. Hosteling is an experience. It’s not always nice, it’s not always clean, but that’s the point. It’s up close and personal, it’s in your face, it’s real.
Of course, there’s a limit to the dirtiness and creepiness and all. I mean, I’ve stayed in some hostels that I would never recommend to anyone again, hostels where we stayed the night and then got out as soon as possible. And there are definitely disadvantages to the old style hostels- cramming into a bunk bed-filled room, loud strangers at all hours of the night, shared bathrooms, etc. It’s not high living, but I think it’s still an important experience. You’ve got all the time in your life to stay up in a fancy hotel. Just try it at least once or twice. It’s like camping. Sure it’s no fun to get bugs and sticks in your sleeping bag, or have to get out in the freezing air to go to the bathroom at 2 am, but we still do it. For the experience. And because there’s so much more to get out of it.
I’ve met some of the most interesting people in hostels. I’ve had strange and intriguing conversations (various unconventional views on life), shared and taken advice (skip that attraction, make sure you go there), discussed the most trivial things (best way to make spaghetti sauce) all in those “grubby” common rooms on the “threadbare, springy sofas” that Conlin writes about. I wouldn’t give that up for all the fancy, Ikea-type furniture in the world. Who cares about flat-screen TVs when a woman is telling stories about traveling through Africa, or that group of traveling students is describing their run-in with drag queens on the beach?
I guess, overall, it’s all about atmosphere. Hostels are places to connect with people- fellow travelers searching for the same and different things as you are. I’m not against having nice, clean, cheap places to sleep. And I do avoid those rooms with 12 bunk-beds when possible. I just don’t like the idea of stream-lining hostels. Of making them … shinier. I want to see the peeling paint. I want to hang my laundry from the windows. Otherwise, I may as well be in another Super 8, or Days Inn.
Anyways, those are my thoughts. Build new shiny hostels if you want, but don’t get rid of the old gritty ones. Some of us want to remember where we are.
The Antiscian 