Hostels tend to get a bad reputation. Over Christmas dinner, as I discussed my travels, I found my family in complete shock and mild disgust that I had (gasp) spent nights in rooms with strangers. One friend of the family even brought up the movie "Hostel" (2005) and was convinced it was a documentary, not just what I like to call "horror-porn."
As someone who has stayed in his fair share of hostels, I can assure you that I have been neither raped nor tortured and have no intentions of being so in the next four months. If you won't use hostels because of that movie, you might as well not take showers in motels, and you should only go to areas of southern California that have absolutely no birds.
Now, with that out of the way, there are some things that you should keep in mind when choosing a hostel and be warned about before entering one.
To begin with, unless you feel particularly intrepid in your travels, make sure you book a hostel before reaching your city. I've had such good experiences at hostels because I have not chosen them at random. Use reviews from a site like HostelWorld.com.
The top thing you want to keep in mind is location. If you're only spending a few days in a place, you definitely don't want a half-hour commute between you and everything you want to see. Thankfully, most hostels are located right in the middle of a city and will give you a map outlining the more touristy attractions and giving you the insider's tips.
Other things to consider are en-suite bathrooms, curfew and security lockers. As for cleanliness and fun ... well, as long as you're not bunking with some rats or being ordered to sit quietly all weekend and diagram sentences, you should be fine.
The big, sticky question that always comes up is what size room to stay in. Hostel rooms range from six to 16 beds. The more beds, the cheaper per person.
At first, I believed that fewer beds would mean the lesser chance of a getting a snorer, but I was wrong. Every single time I stay in a hostel, I will undoubtedly encounter the worst snorer of my life. Snorers in hostels are like Terminators - they always come back, and each new one is far worse than any of the prior ones. I've had snorers of all shapes and sizes in rooms of all shapes and sizes. At least when I was in the large room, I could console myself by saying, "You get what you paid for."
Snorers and horror films aside, hostels are great fun. There is no better feeling in the world than to find your hostel, to be given a map of the city (with stuff circled by the person at the desk), to put your luggage down, and then to be ready to go out and conquer the world. I can only hope that a wedding day or first child brings as much joy.
And of course, there's the general sense of adventure. You're young, you're stupid and you're probably broke. Why waste valuable cash on a hotel room when you can stay in a hostel, which has so much more roguish romanticism to it? And if the people in the bed next to you start having sex in the middle of the night (yes, that's happened to me), it's just another story to tell later on.
Devin Toohey is a junior majoring in classics. He can be reached at Devin.Toohey@tufts.edu.
