My Best Travel Story
Jul. 17th, 2008 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleOr: The Week I Walked Through the Lobbies of Hostels in Two Separate European Capitals Wearing Nothing But a Towel, and Broke Out of a Third Hostel Without Paying My Bill in Full
The point of this is really the story itself (the journey, as they say, not the destination), but let me tell you up front the two morals of the story:
Just about in the middle of these travels, I went to Greece, where I spent some time in Athens, took day trips to Delphi and Epidaurus, spent a few days on Paros with a day trip to Antiparos (the most beautiful place I've ever been), and came back to Athens for a night before I headed back toward Western Europe. At that time, the hostel in Athens cost $4/night. That didn't include breakfast, but you could get a pastry at their cafe across the street for a dollar. Not only that, when I came back after traveling elsewhere for several days, the woman working there remembered my name.
Stage One: Greece to Italy
I'd taken the ferry from Brindisi, Italy to Patras, Greece and the train from there to Athens. For the first part of my journey to Paris, I made the same trip in reverse. The train I took from Athens to Patras took a long time, long enough that I stayed the night in a hotel in Patras and arranged to go on the boat that left early in the morning. Before retiring for the evening, I stopped and bought some apricots for the trip.
Early the next morning, I got up and joined the crowds of backpackers waiting to catch the ferry to Brindisi. On the way there, the ferry took 24 hours, and it had something of the air of a party because everyone was excited to go to Greece. The trip back took 26 hours, and people weren't quite as jovial as they were going the other direction. The ferry takes you out on the water at night, and it's cold. Let me take this opportunity to tell you that the sum total of my clothing for this whole summer consisted of a few pairs of shorts, a few tank tops, one pair of jeans, one skirt, one long-sleeved denim shirt, and one or two pairs of sandals. I opted for the middle option of a chair inside (high-end: sleeping bunk; low-end: deck space), but even sleeping in a chair is only comfortable for so long. Halfway through the journey, I opened my backpack to get my apricots and discovered they'd squished all over my Lonely Planet and the magazines I'd bought in Spain.
Stage Two: Brindisi to Rome
Brindisi is, or was at the time, essentially a port and a train station with a long, car-free street running between them. I started down the street, but realized partway through that I didn't really know where I was and my guidebook said the hostel had a shuttle that would come pick me up. I stopped at a pay phone along this very long street and called the number from my guidebook. After some confusion about where exactly I was, the hostel staff agreed to come pick me up. They had a white van that stopped at the nearest crossroads to get me. When I look back on this, I wonder if it had a sign on it or if I just trustingly climbed into an unknown white van. Whatever the case may have been, I got in the van and we started towards the hostel. Along the way, we saw a pair of backpackers walking the same direction we were going, and the guy from the hostel pulled over to find out if they were going to the hostel. They were, and they climbed into the van with me. They were Sebastian and Chantal, who were French Canadian. We continued on to the hostel. Because I didn't intend to be in Italy for very long, I didn't have much in the way of lira (this was pre-Euro), and asked if I could pay by credit card. The hostel was okay with this, but their credit card machine was down. They told me I could pay in the morning. They put Sebastian and Chantal in a room together, and put me in a room with a large number of beds and no other people.
I headed back to the lobby to get a ride back into the town to get my train tickets and find something to eat. This is when I met the other players in this part of the story: Steve, Danelle, and Janelle, who were, of course, from Orange County, California. The six of us piled into the van, and the hostel dropped us off at the train station and told us they would be back to pick us up at eight. We all had train tickets to purchase, and then I wandered for a bit with Sebastian and Chantal. I'd spent so much time around other languages that I had no trouble understanding them even when they were speaking to each other in French, which I don't actually speak. (I'm still a little amazed by this.) At eight, the six of us reconvened at the train station where we waited for the hostel van to show up. After we'd been waiting for quite a while, Janelle or Danelle went to a pay phone and called them. They assured her they'd be right there to get us. After we'd been waiting for even longer, she went back and called them again. This time, she came back with a new message: their driver was drunk, and we should take a taxi and they would pay for it. There were, you may remember, six of us, which meant we took two taxis back to the hostel. The hostel didn't officially open until later than our trains were leaving, so we asked about breakfast and getting to the train station. The hostel people told us they would leave something out for us, and that there was a bus that stopped at the gas station next door at 6:30 am. Danelle and Janelle, upon finding out they'd put me in a room all by myself, invited me to join them in their room and also clued me in to the fact that the best bathroom in the place was the one tiled in red. We all went to bed for a good night's sleep.
In the morning, Steve, Danelle, Janelle, and I got up and got ready to leave. At this point, I realized they'd never processed my credit card, and I didn't have enough lira to pay them. I left them what I had with an apologetic note. They hadn't left breakfast out for us, but we soldiered on anyway. We left the hostel building to discover that the grounds are fenced and the gate was locked. We couldn't find an employee anywhere around. We were probably not the first people to have this problem, as there was a small section of fence that had been bent up. We shoved our backpacks through it, and then climbed over the fence or through the hole (depending on personal inclination) to make our great escape. We went to the bus stop and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. We eventually started walking. By the time the bus passed us, we'd long since missed our trains. When we got to the train station, we were able to trade in our tickets for tickets on the next set of trains that would send us in the directions we were going. To wait for those trains, we dumped our backpacks in a pile and sat down. At some point, we realized that we hadn't seen Sebastian and Chantal yet, and they'd also had an early train. They arrived well past the time of their train because they'd had the same experience we'd had. We all hung out together for a while, and then drifted off to the tracks for our respective trains.
Stage Three: Rome (Again)
I'd been through Rome on the first part my travels, and spent several days there. I'd also been there once with my family. Consequently, I didn't feel the need to spend any more time there. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't get a ticket on that day's overnight train to Paris. I got one for the next night and called both Rome Hostelling International hostels, only to find they were both full. A guy came by just as I hung up with the second one, wondering what I was going to do, and handed me a little flyer for a non-HI affiliated hostel. I asked if he could guarantee me a room. He assured me that, yes, if I went there, I would get a room. So I went there, and they had room for me. The hostel was a little sketchy (which I definitely have to use to describe it because it was current slang at the time), but serviceable. The lobby was a small room at the center, with a few rooms and a hallway coming off of it. By this time, I'd been traveling all day, and I really wanted a shower. The place had two bathrooms. The lock on the one in the hall didn't work, so I opted for the one off the lobby. The sink in this one drained into an overflowing bucket. This was only slightly less icky than you think it was. The place was good enough for me to take a shower in, but there was no way I was going to try to put on my clean clothes while avoiding the water. So I wrapped my towel around me and went through the lobby back to my room. To get the full picture: this was before I lost weight, and it was a very large beach towel. This got exactly the kind of strange looks you're imagining it got.
Remember that I'd been through Rome, and seen everything I wanted to see, and really just wanted to move on. So the next morning, I took my clothes to the laundromat I knew of from the first pass through Rome, and then stopped by an internet cafe to check my email. (As an aside, I wonder now, typing this, how backpacking through Europe has or hasn't changed with the advent of the iPod and not-quite-ubiquitous laptops.) Then I went to the train station thinking I would hang out there until it was time to board my train. In this I was sorely mistaken. You see, the Rome train station has only a very small amount of seating and a security guard whose job it is to tell you to stand up if you dare drop your backpack on the floor and sit on it. Yes, it really was that absurd. I stood around for much of the day, went around the corner to a restaurant for some food and a chance to sit, and eventually boarded my train to Paris.
Stage Four: Rome to Paris
My train from Rome to Paris was an overnight train. I was in a compartment with five other people, and the seats folded out into bunks. The other five people in my compartment were an Asian family, and they were prepared for the trip: they had food and blankets. I had a towel. Remember that I was traveling from Rome to Paris in July. I was dressed appropriately for Rome in shorts and a tank top. This is not appropriate clothing as you approach Paris, and I remember being cold even on the train.
Stage Five: Paris
The train arrived in Paris early in the morning. This is where I remember really being cold. Because it was morning, I hopped onto the Metro and made my way to a hostel. If you don't have reservations, you have to be there early in the morning to get a spot in a hostel in a European capital in the summer. I was early enough to get a room, but too early to get into the room. At this point, I was feeling cold and grungy, and spent the hours until they would let me in rattling around their lobby area staying out of the cleaning staff's way. I also changed from my shorts into jeans.
At whatever appointed time they would let people into the rooms, I took the key and headed upstairs to my assigned room. First order of business was a shower, so I gathered up my toiletries and towel. I figured there was a short hallway between the room and the bathroom, so I left my clean clothes there. My next dilemma was: there's one key. If I take it with me and lock the door, the other people in the room won't be able to get in. So I left the key and left the door unlocked and headed for a blissfully warm shower. All was well until I went back to the room. The door wouldn't open. Yes, that's right. Someone had come up to the room, and she'd locked the door on her way out. I went downstairs to the desk. At this point, I'd been having a week of travel misadventures all to get from Athens to Paris, I was very tired, and I was only wearing a towel, so as I started to explain to the poor French girl working there what had happened, I started to cry. She looked at me like I was crazy and she didn't quite know what to do with me, and then she gave me the master key and said, the way you would say to someone whose rationality you're not quite sure of, "You can bring it back when you're done." I went back upstairs, unlocked the door, and cried all the way through getting dressed. When I'd calmed down, I gathered my day travel things, locked the door, and took both keys back down to the desk. Then I went to Notre Dame, which was incredibly beautiful, and everything was fine after that.
Postscript
I like to end the story with Notre Dame because it puts a nice finish on it. The real end to the story is that the other three girls in my room at the hostel were a trio of Australians who'd also just arrived that day. I returned from Notre Dame and whatever else I'd done that day to find two of them consoling the third who was sobbing because her grandmother was very sick and even though they'd just arrived in Europe, she didn't think she could stay. I gave them some Kleenex and they set out to get her a plane ticket home for the next day. A day or two later, when we were hanging out in the lobby after breakfast and I went to leave to catch my train to Belgium, one of the European boys we'd been chatting with said, "You're leaving your friends?" and was quite surprised to learn that we'd only met each other a few days ago and the only time we'd spent together had been short moments in the hostel.
The point of this is really the story itself (the journey, as they say, not the destination), but let me tell you up front the two morals of the story:
- If you're traveling from Athens to Paris, just fly.
- There's a reason hostels not associated with Hostelling International aren't associated with HI.
Just about in the middle of these travels, I went to Greece, where I spent some time in Athens, took day trips to Delphi and Epidaurus, spent a few days on Paros with a day trip to Antiparos (the most beautiful place I've ever been), and came back to Athens for a night before I headed back toward Western Europe. At that time, the hostel in Athens cost $4/night. That didn't include breakfast, but you could get a pastry at their cafe across the street for a dollar. Not only that, when I came back after traveling elsewhere for several days, the woman working there remembered my name.
Stage One: Greece to Italy
I'd taken the ferry from Brindisi, Italy to Patras, Greece and the train from there to Athens. For the first part of my journey to Paris, I made the same trip in reverse. The train I took from Athens to Patras took a long time, long enough that I stayed the night in a hotel in Patras and arranged to go on the boat that left early in the morning. Before retiring for the evening, I stopped and bought some apricots for the trip.
Early the next morning, I got up and joined the crowds of backpackers waiting to catch the ferry to Brindisi. On the way there, the ferry took 24 hours, and it had something of the air of a party because everyone was excited to go to Greece. The trip back took 26 hours, and people weren't quite as jovial as they were going the other direction. The ferry takes you out on the water at night, and it's cold. Let me take this opportunity to tell you that the sum total of my clothing for this whole summer consisted of a few pairs of shorts, a few tank tops, one pair of jeans, one skirt, one long-sleeved denim shirt, and one or two pairs of sandals. I opted for the middle option of a chair inside (high-end: sleeping bunk; low-end: deck space), but even sleeping in a chair is only comfortable for so long. Halfway through the journey, I opened my backpack to get my apricots and discovered they'd squished all over my Lonely Planet and the magazines I'd bought in Spain.
Stage Two: Brindisi to Rome
Brindisi is, or was at the time, essentially a port and a train station with a long, car-free street running between them. I started down the street, but realized partway through that I didn't really know where I was and my guidebook said the hostel had a shuttle that would come pick me up. I stopped at a pay phone along this very long street and called the number from my guidebook. After some confusion about where exactly I was, the hostel staff agreed to come pick me up. They had a white van that stopped at the nearest crossroads to get me. When I look back on this, I wonder if it had a sign on it or if I just trustingly climbed into an unknown white van. Whatever the case may have been, I got in the van and we started towards the hostel. Along the way, we saw a pair of backpackers walking the same direction we were going, and the guy from the hostel pulled over to find out if they were going to the hostel. They were, and they climbed into the van with me. They were Sebastian and Chantal, who were French Canadian. We continued on to the hostel. Because I didn't intend to be in Italy for very long, I didn't have much in the way of lira (this was pre-Euro), and asked if I could pay by credit card. The hostel was okay with this, but their credit card machine was down. They told me I could pay in the morning. They put Sebastian and Chantal in a room together, and put me in a room with a large number of beds and no other people.
I headed back to the lobby to get a ride back into the town to get my train tickets and find something to eat. This is when I met the other players in this part of the story: Steve, Danelle, and Janelle, who were, of course, from Orange County, California. The six of us piled into the van, and the hostel dropped us off at the train station and told us they would be back to pick us up at eight. We all had train tickets to purchase, and then I wandered for a bit with Sebastian and Chantal. I'd spent so much time around other languages that I had no trouble understanding them even when they were speaking to each other in French, which I don't actually speak. (I'm still a little amazed by this.) At eight, the six of us reconvened at the train station where we waited for the hostel van to show up. After we'd been waiting for quite a while, Janelle or Danelle went to a pay phone and called them. They assured her they'd be right there to get us. After we'd been waiting for even longer, she went back and called them again. This time, she came back with a new message: their driver was drunk, and we should take a taxi and they would pay for it. There were, you may remember, six of us, which meant we took two taxis back to the hostel. The hostel didn't officially open until later than our trains were leaving, so we asked about breakfast and getting to the train station. The hostel people told us they would leave something out for us, and that there was a bus that stopped at the gas station next door at 6:30 am. Danelle and Janelle, upon finding out they'd put me in a room all by myself, invited me to join them in their room and also clued me in to the fact that the best bathroom in the place was the one tiled in red. We all went to bed for a good night's sleep.
In the morning, Steve, Danelle, Janelle, and I got up and got ready to leave. At this point, I realized they'd never processed my credit card, and I didn't have enough lira to pay them. I left them what I had with an apologetic note. They hadn't left breakfast out for us, but we soldiered on anyway. We left the hostel building to discover that the grounds are fenced and the gate was locked. We couldn't find an employee anywhere around. We were probably not the first people to have this problem, as there was a small section of fence that had been bent up. We shoved our backpacks through it, and then climbed over the fence or through the hole (depending on personal inclination) to make our great escape. We went to the bus stop and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. We eventually started walking. By the time the bus passed us, we'd long since missed our trains. When we got to the train station, we were able to trade in our tickets for tickets on the next set of trains that would send us in the directions we were going. To wait for those trains, we dumped our backpacks in a pile and sat down. At some point, we realized that we hadn't seen Sebastian and Chantal yet, and they'd also had an early train. They arrived well past the time of their train because they'd had the same experience we'd had. We all hung out together for a while, and then drifted off to the tracks for our respective trains.
Stage Three: Rome (Again)
I'd been through Rome on the first part my travels, and spent several days there. I'd also been there once with my family. Consequently, I didn't feel the need to spend any more time there. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't get a ticket on that day's overnight train to Paris. I got one for the next night and called both Rome Hostelling International hostels, only to find they were both full. A guy came by just as I hung up with the second one, wondering what I was going to do, and handed me a little flyer for a non-HI affiliated hostel. I asked if he could guarantee me a room. He assured me that, yes, if I went there, I would get a room. So I went there, and they had room for me. The hostel was a little sketchy (which I definitely have to use to describe it because it was current slang at the time), but serviceable. The lobby was a small room at the center, with a few rooms and a hallway coming off of it. By this time, I'd been traveling all day, and I really wanted a shower. The place had two bathrooms. The lock on the one in the hall didn't work, so I opted for the one off the lobby. The sink in this one drained into an overflowing bucket. This was only slightly less icky than you think it was. The place was good enough for me to take a shower in, but there was no way I was going to try to put on my clean clothes while avoiding the water. So I wrapped my towel around me and went through the lobby back to my room. To get the full picture: this was before I lost weight, and it was a very large beach towel. This got exactly the kind of strange looks you're imagining it got.
Remember that I'd been through Rome, and seen everything I wanted to see, and really just wanted to move on. So the next morning, I took my clothes to the laundromat I knew of from the first pass through Rome, and then stopped by an internet cafe to check my email. (As an aside, I wonder now, typing this, how backpacking through Europe has or hasn't changed with the advent of the iPod and not-quite-ubiquitous laptops.) Then I went to the train station thinking I would hang out there until it was time to board my train. In this I was sorely mistaken. You see, the Rome train station has only a very small amount of seating and a security guard whose job it is to tell you to stand up if you dare drop your backpack on the floor and sit on it. Yes, it really was that absurd. I stood around for much of the day, went around the corner to a restaurant for some food and a chance to sit, and eventually boarded my train to Paris.
Stage Four: Rome to Paris
My train from Rome to Paris was an overnight train. I was in a compartment with five other people, and the seats folded out into bunks. The other five people in my compartment were an Asian family, and they were prepared for the trip: they had food and blankets. I had a towel. Remember that I was traveling from Rome to Paris in July. I was dressed appropriately for Rome in shorts and a tank top. This is not appropriate clothing as you approach Paris, and I remember being cold even on the train.
Stage Five: Paris
The train arrived in Paris early in the morning. This is where I remember really being cold. Because it was morning, I hopped onto the Metro and made my way to a hostel. If you don't have reservations, you have to be there early in the morning to get a spot in a hostel in a European capital in the summer. I was early enough to get a room, but too early to get into the room. At this point, I was feeling cold and grungy, and spent the hours until they would let me in rattling around their lobby area staying out of the cleaning staff's way. I also changed from my shorts into jeans.
At whatever appointed time they would let people into the rooms, I took the key and headed upstairs to my assigned room. First order of business was a shower, so I gathered up my toiletries and towel. I figured there was a short hallway between the room and the bathroom, so I left my clean clothes there. My next dilemma was: there's one key. If I take it with me and lock the door, the other people in the room won't be able to get in. So I left the key and left the door unlocked and headed for a blissfully warm shower. All was well until I went back to the room. The door wouldn't open. Yes, that's right. Someone had come up to the room, and she'd locked the door on her way out. I went downstairs to the desk. At this point, I'd been having a week of travel misadventures all to get from Athens to Paris, I was very tired, and I was only wearing a towel, so as I started to explain to the poor French girl working there what had happened, I started to cry. She looked at me like I was crazy and she didn't quite know what to do with me, and then she gave me the master key and said, the way you would say to someone whose rationality you're not quite sure of, "You can bring it back when you're done." I went back upstairs, unlocked the door, and cried all the way through getting dressed. When I'd calmed down, I gathered my day travel things, locked the door, and took both keys back down to the desk. Then I went to Notre Dame, which was incredibly beautiful, and everything was fine after that.
Postscript
I like to end the story with Notre Dame because it puts a nice finish on it. The real end to the story is that the other three girls in my room at the hostel were a trio of Australians who'd also just arrived that day. I returned from Notre Dame and whatever else I'd done that day to find two of them consoling the third who was sobbing because her grandmother was very sick and even though they'd just arrived in Europe, she didn't think she could stay. I gave them some Kleenex and they set out to get her a plane ticket home for the next day. A day or two later, when we were hanging out in the lobby after breakfast and I went to leave to catch my train to Belgium, one of the European boys we'd been chatting with said, "You're leaving your friends?" and was quite surprised to learn that we'd only met each other a few days ago and the only time we'd spent together had been short moments in the hostel.