Hostel life

Oh my hostel life, every memory kay saya (how happy--I'm adapting a sharon Cuneta song). Well, not exactly.

For €25 or less, you can get a bed with sheets, a locker (for a deposit) and breakfast. Of course, you have to share the room and the toilet/showers, but it's not a big price to pay to be in the heart of the city. We booked our beds through hostelworld.com, which is a good place to start your search if you're on a shoestring budget.

Alberguinn is walking distance from Barcelona Sants station. The place is new, colorful and full of very young travelers. There's airconditioning (essential at the time), wireless internet and two new PCs running on Ubuntu.

We stayed in a mixed 6-bed room, the smallest one in the hostel. Our roommates were a Chinese couple, psych students who came for a conference and bundled this with a trip to other cities in Spain. When I woke up the following morning, I was surprised to see the two other beds occupied by half-naked guys whose nationalities I never found out (possibly French, according to Indi).

The Spanish owners are very fond of the hardworking Filipina cleaner, were extremely helpful and only had good things to say about Filipinos in Barcelona. They made restaurant recommendations (which we followed--that's fodder for another post) and pointed out the places where most of the servers are Pinoy.

The Sunflower Hostel in Berlin is walking distance from Warschauer S+U stations in the eastern part of town. When we arrived, the music was reggae and the girl at reception had dreadlocks but looked like Steffi Graf.

Eight beds this time. Our roommates were two women whose origins I couldn't place, and a teenage French girl and her mom who was always preparing their meals (they seemed to be forever not in speaking terms). The four of them slept early on our first night. The following morning, the two other beds were occupied by half-naked guys who we discovered to be Danes because of they had corny ringtones and we could understand some of their conversations. We guessed they were in Berlin because it's close to Denmark and cheap to drink there--you wouldn't come back to your room between 4 to 6am every day otherwise.

Though a good deal for the variety of food on offer (€3 for breakfast), we took advantage of the cheap prices and bought our morning ration at the zoo. Just kidding. The supermarket outside the zoo, I mean.

There's wireless Internet near reception and pay PCs. The only thing I don't like is that on our part of the floor, there were only two WC/bathrooms and the showers aren't separated from the toilets. Fortunately, I never had to queue.

A Christian hotel in Amsterdam's Red Light District? You better believe it. We didn't realize it at first because it was raining heavily when we arrived, but the following day, we found out that we were just a block away from the women in the windows that Amsterdam is famous for. (That explains the shady characters in the area.) But we felt safe at Shelter City, which is run mostly by American volunteers. We never went past the 2am curfew (or past midnight in any city, for that matter) nor attended any of the hostel events (including game nights and prayer times).

The photo is of De Waag at Nieumarkt, a stone's throw away from the hostel. I don't have any of the Shelter City.

The first night, I felt uneasy because my backpack and some of the clothes in it got wet, and the dorm was cramped compared to Sunflower. We stayed in a 14-bed female dorm and had to move rooms twice because of the bookings. One complaint: the general lack of ventilation inside the hostel. Other than that, it's a very pleasant place. There's Internet for €0,30 per 10 minutes, which sounds like a lot, but it's cheap for Amsterdam, where everything has a price.

The older brother figure who was at reception when we checked out at 6am gave us sandwiches and apple juice in tetra briks for takeaway breakfast. Jacob, who prepared my sandwich, drew a caricature on the napkin (which I guess is himself) with the speech bubble "Jesus saves" and also wrote "God bless". Thoughtful.