Home is where you take your backpack off

After extensive field studies in towns and cities across England and Scotland, I’ve developed a few thoughts on hostels.  Not one where I stayed in York, Grasmere, Stirling, Corpach, or Edinburgh met all of the following criteria for my ideal:

-sturdy bunk beds that don’t wiggle or squeak when your bunkmate rolls over (the one in York had bits falling off of it!)

-individual reading lights (York tried, but the hinge was broken and it kept flopping into the wall)

-a sink in the room

-no more than ten people sleeping in one dorm room (twenty in Stirling was a bit much)

-free wifi, and with a fast enough connection to upload photos (it took an average of five tries in Stirling to even get online, and when I tried to upload a video in York, it initially said the upload would take 20 minutes, but then kept getting longer. I gave up around seven hours)

-free breakfast, or at least cheap ones (it was only 70 pence in Edinburgh for a massive bowl of cereal)

-free coffee and tea, AND milk provided for the tea (I’ve developed this little afternoon tea habit…)

-loosey-goosey cleaning schedule (the hostel in Corpach asked all guests to vacate the premises from 9:30-4:30 every day for cleaning. Really? Not cool when it pours on a regular basis and there’s nothing to do in town. Or if you just want to take a nap.)

-lockers in the dorm rooms (in Edinburgh, there were even little lockboxes inside the lockers)

-no snoring! (there was stereo snoring in Grasmere for all three nights I was there. Several of us were awake for hours. I could even hear it with the volume cranked up on my iPod. Surprisingly in Edinburgh, the city where three different festivals were going on concurrently, no one snored in my room, that I could tell. Maybe I was just too pooped to hear)

-no one steals my food from the fridge (ie, most of my blueberries in Grasmere and my milk in Corpach)

-a manager who will flirt with you, then arrange for you to meet a retired American professor of English literature living in town because he thinks you miss talking to Americans (Grasmere)

-lower bunk with enough room to actually fully sit up without danger of braining yourself

-pillows that are thicker and softer than communion wafers (Corpach, York, Edinburgh...)

-roommates who don’t wake up at 5:30 and proceed to pack all their belongings in crinkly plastic bags (Edinburgh)

-roommates who don’t wake up at 6 and proceed to have loud conversations in Lithuanian before finally leaving (Corpach)

-cool guests who like talking to the other ones. I met travelers from Russia (Ivan was getting a PhD in physcis in London. Just a little smart), Finland (Alex was living in the hostel in Corpach for three months going to commerical diving school), Austria, Australia, the Philippines, America, Canada, England, France, and Scotland. I met some ladies from Manchester when I was staying in Grasmere. They couldn’t believe I was actually working on a farm. They recommended I completely skip visiting Manchester. I had an interesting conversation with a bunch of colorful, middle-aged Scottish men staying in my hostel in Corpach. They were part of a hiking club, and had just climbed Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in the British Isles, along with several of the other Munros that day, 22 miles in all. I’m pretty sure they were Glaswegians, in other words, people from Glasgow whose accent is so broad you need a translator. Of all the people I met over the last two months, their accent was the most difficult for me to understand. They seemed to like me fine, though. One guy had visited Seattle a few years ago, and I could understand him fairly well. He translated the others for me. I got a little worried, though, when I said I’d worked on a farm in England for a month. These guys do not like the English. In fact, they taught me what they like to call Englishmen: F.E.B.s. (I’ll give you a hint, the ‘E’ stands for English). I guess they liked me well enough to give me a bowl of their homemade stew, called “stovies.” I’d already eaten a full dinner, and I only wanted a little. But they dished me up a full bowl, and swore I’d eat the whole thing. I did. It was delicious. Apparently, stovies is any sort of stew with meat and potatoes and whatever else the cook decides to throw in. When I asked them the question I asked as many Scots as possible—“Is haggis really worth it?”—they gave me a resounding “Yes.”  I think they may have also invited me out for a drink in Fort William too, but I’m not sure. Even with my translator, I only got about 80% of the conversation.

 (this was the label outside one of the rooms in the York hostel which was a former mansion owned by super-rich people)