Hostel life

In some ways, being in a hostel with a bunch of people from all over the world can be interesting. It's cool that you never know who you'll meet or what kind of conversations you'll have. For instance, last night I was chatting briefly with the guy at the computer next to me. We were both ecstatic about free internet. :-) The conversation turned toward food (and getting some of it) and we decided to go to the market to get stuff to prepare back at the hostel. Another guy that I'd met earlier in the day wanted in, too, so we were off. The grocery store was interesting. We'd decided on the walk that we were gonna do pasta, but somehow we were still in the store for more than an hour. A big part of that time was trying to figure out what things were. Do you think this is cream? What kind of meat is this exactly? It looks like this could be butter, but it feels too hard to be butter. And so on. It was fun actually.

We got back to the hostel and wanted to put stuff in our rooms before we started cooking so we head upstairs. Huh, that's weird. We're both on the 5th floor. Huh, also weird - we're in the same room on the 5th floor. Even weirder, we're on the same bunk (I have the bottom) in the same room on the same floor. Crazy coincidence, right?

Anyway, we cooked, ate, and chatted together for awhile. He even shared his absinthe with me. (I don't recommend it!) We are both traveling alone so today we are going to go exploring together. It will be fun to have someone to sightsee with since I've mostly been doing that on my own.

This was an example of the good hostel life. On the flip side of that is: waking up to boys doing shots of Jaegermeister at 9am; loud Australians pounding through the room on their way to check out; random middle of the night farts; etc, etc. It hasn't been bad, though. Having had no experience with hostels prior to setting off on my trip, I'd say it's been positive overall.