Hostel Life: A Beautiful Way to Meet People You Never Needed to Meet

Barcelona, Tallinn, Manila, Himachal. I was only the problem once, and nobody even noticed.

Eleven years of this and I could not draw you the layout of a single hostel I have stayed in. The people who kept me awake in them, however, I could describe under oath.

Barcelona, or: Everything I Know About Football

Barcelona, 3 AM, and two men came into the dorm still arguing about football.

Not arguing, exactly. Agreeing loudly, which is worse, because an argument can be won and ended, whereas two men agreeing with each other about football has no natural conclusion.

They had been somewhere and were still in that somewhere in their heads, and the transition to a dark room containing fifteen horizontal strangers had not registered as a change of context. They came through the door mid-sentence. The door closed, but the sentences continued.

They were in white. Real Madrid white, in Barcelona, which even I know is a decision, and I remember lying there thinking that whatever these two were, they were not local, or they were local and enjoying themselves enormously.

I had been in that dorm a few days by then and so had they, and I knew who they were before they opened the door, which is a way of saying I had noticed them earlier in the week for reasons that had nothing to do with football.

So when they came in at three, I was annoyed, but not in the way I would have been annoyed by strangers. Somebody else in that room was composing a confrontation, running through the phrasing, deciding whether to sit up. I was not. I was mostly just listening.

Somewhere down there, two men in Real Madrid shirts were having the best night of their lives.

And this is the thing nobody admits about dorm noise: the calculation is never really about the noise. If I say something, does it stop, or does it become a conversation, and will I then have to see these people at breakfast, and is there a version of me that says something at three in the morning that I would be happy to be?

There is not. So you say nothing, and you lie there, and you listen. I have got better at this in my thirties, or at least more selective about what I put up with, but not that night.

What I did instead of sleeping was learn. I know a particular player’s numbers from a particular season, or I knew them at the time; I could not produce them on demand anymore, but they went in, filed next to other information I did not ask for.

Twenty minutes? Longer. Time does something strange when you are horizontal and awake and doing arithmetic about strangers. I have never in my life been kept awake by anyone I minded less.

Tallinn was worse, and I had less sympathy.

Two women, two thirty in the morning, getting ready.

Lights on. And I need to be specific because the specificity is the whole offence: not phone-light, not a torch angled into a corner, not the bathroom door left ajar.

The actual overhead dorm lights. The full ceiling. The whole room lit like a place where things happen, at two thirty in the morning, for two people, while eight or nine others lay in it with their eyes shut against it.

And I want to be fair, because I can hear how this sounds. People do get ready at night. That is what night is for. But two thirty is not the beginning of anything. Whatever these two were getting ready for was downstream of something, an after-party, some third thing that happens in cities at three in the morning that I have never been invited to and have stopped expecting to be.

Still open. Still going. I was asleep three streets away, briefly.

I lay there genuinely curious about where they were going. I am still curious.

Two people mumbled. This is the standard dorm protest, the mumble: deniable, non-committal, engineered to register displeasure while committing to nothing, so that if anyone turns around and says what, you can be asleep again instantly and blamelessly.

The women did not hear. I mean they heard. Everyone heard, and they carried on at the same volume with the same lighting, because they had decided before entering that room that nothing was going to slow them down. They were right. Nothing did.

They finished. They left. The lights stayed on a while after they went, and eventually somebody else got up and turned them off, and I have always slightly admired whoever it was for doing the thing the rest of us were lying there not doing.

I am rarely the problem in these rooms, and this is scheduling, not virtue. I am a night owl. I do not wake at five. I am not moving around a dark dorm at any hour because at those hours I am unconscious like a reasonable person, which means my capacity to inconvenience anybody is structurally limited.

Except once.

Manila.

Manila and I have history. It is the city where I once rode a metro confidently in the wrong direction for ten stations, which I have written about already, and where I did most of my sightseeing on no money at all, which is a different post entirely. This is neither of those.

I had an early flight, and I was properly groggy, that stupidity that comes from being woken in the middle of your own sleep rather than at the end of it, operating on the part of the brain that handles walking and very little else.

There was a terrace outside the dorm with the entire city on it, and I had this sentimental idea that I would look at it one more time before leaving, at four in the morning, face still creased from the pillow. So I got up and walked toward it.

Worth a broken nose. Just about.

The dorm was enormous. Twenty-something beds, the patio at one end, the door at the other. And between me and the patio there was a glass wall. Floor to ceiling, spotless, and I did not know it was there.

There may have been screens across it during the day. Or, more likely, I had spent several days in a room without once registering the enormous transparent architectural feature at the end of it, because that is very much the kind of thing I do.

I walked into it at full speed. Forehead first, nose second, with the complete follow-through of someone crossing a room they believe to be empty, no flinch, no hands up, nothing, because you cannot brace for something you do not know exists.

There was a thud. Not a tap, not a bump, a proper resonant noise of face meeting structural glass, the ones you see in Mr. Bean, which would bring at least three people up onto their elbows saying Are you okay? Are you okay? What happened.

Nobody woke up. Not one person. Twenty-odd people slept straight through it while I stood in the dark with my hands over my nose waiting to find out how bad it was, and nobody moved, nobody asked, nobody so much as changed the rhythm of their breathing.

I have chosen not to think too hard about what that says, either about that dorm or about me.

And then I got out onto the patio, and I laughed. Properly, out loud, alone, at four in the morning, face throbbing, in a city where not one person knew who I was.

I laughed for a good while about it, which is a thing you can do at four in the morning in a foreign city that you cannot really do anywhere else. Solo travel does not make you brave. It mostly just leaves you alone with yourself, sometimes at four in the morning, sometimes holding your own nose.

Then I looked up, and there it was, the entire skyline, towers and lights all the way out, the air cool for the first time all week, and I stood there taking it in with a swelling nose, more awake than I had been in months, which was, technically, exactly what I had come out there for.

The plastic bags were Himachal.

Woman in the bunk above mine, early checkout, bus to catch, and I cannot fault her for that; buses do not wait. What I can fault is what she did with the bags.

Thirty minutes. Possibly forty-five. I did not time it because that would have meant looking at my phone, and looking at my phone would have meant admitting I was awake, and I was still pretending I was going back to sleep.

So: somewhere between thirty minutes and forever, this woman rummaged. Through plastic. Above my head. In a silent room in the mountains at four thirty in the morning.

I had not known before that morning how loud a plastic bag is. You go your whole life handling them at reasonable hours surrounded by traffic and conversation and form a completely wrong impression of the volume they are capable of, and then one morning a stranger opens one eighteen inches above your face in a room where the only other sound is people breathing, and you understand that a plastic bag is essentially a percussion instrument.

And there kept being more of them. She would finish one, there would be a pause of maybe four seconds, long enough for hope, and then another would start, and I began to wonder whether her backpack was a portal to somewhere with a great many plastic bags in it.

Interleaved with this, the zips. Open, close. Open, close. Open, pause, close. Open again. She had a fifty-litre backpack and a small laptop bag, that is the full inventory, a finite and honestly quite modest number of zips, and yet she worked through them like a woman conducting an audit.

I do not know what she was doing. I know only the sound, which has stayed with me more clearly than most conversations I have had.

She left, and it did not help, because by then the damage was done, and I lay there another twenty minutes doing that thing where you keep your eyes shut very deliberately as a negotiation with sleep, as though sleep is a person who can be convinced. Sleep was not fooled. Sleep had been insulted and had left the building somewhere around the fourth plastic bag.

I want to explain what this actually costs me, because I do not think people who wake at six understand it. I am a night owl. The hours between about four and eight are the only ones in which I sleep properly, and everything before that is shallow and negotiable and does not count.

So a person rummaging above my head at five is not taking twenty minutes from me. She is taking the whole thing.

I gave it a few more minutes out of stubbornness. Turned over. Turned back. Did the pillow adjustment, looking for any cold sides left, when I knew the problem was not the pillow.

Considered being angry, then could not sustain it, because she had a bus, and buses do not wait, and I have almost certainly done something similar to somebody without knowing.

The morning I did not ask for.

So I got up. Which I never do. I put on whatever was closest and went outside into a morning I had not asked for and had no plans for.

And it was, I am annoyed to report, spectacular. The Himalayas were sitting right there with snow still on them, doing the thing mountains do in the early morning where the light has not properly arrived, and everything looks slightly unreal.

The apple orchards glowed, with the smell coming off them, and flowers I could not name doing whatever flowers do at that hour, and the air was cold in the way mountain air is cold, which is different from other cold, and it woke my face up.

There was nobody around. That is the part I think about most. No one asking anything of me, no one talking about football, no one getting ready for a party that had already ended, no plastic.

Just a woman who had not slept, standing in an orchard, at an hour she has spent her entire life avoiding, looking at mountains.

Waking up early is not so bad.

I have not done it since.

Right. Your turn.

Everyone who has stayed in a dorm has one of these, and I want yours. The 3 AM arrival. The light. The alarm that rang for eleven minutes while its owner slept through it. Or, be honest, the time you were the one, and the plastic bags were yours.

Not the dorm in question. They never are.

Tell me in the comments. I will read every single one, and I will almost certainly feel better about the glass wall.

If you are new here, I write about solo travel roughly every week, usually the parts that do not make it into anyone’s highlight reel. No app, nothing to download, just your email.