One of my most enjoyable experiences traveling abroad has been staying in hostels with a motley crew of impoverished students and professionals in their late twenties and thirties who’ve decided to travel the world for six months instead of buying a Ferrari. Meeting a bunch of strangers from all over the world who are as disoriented and out of place as you are is one of the most genuinely European experiences I’ve ever had. It’s like The Real World but with less sex and fewer rednecks.
Being at a university with more than 200 mostly American exchange students makes it hard to make real British friends. It is weird hanging out exclusively with 18-year-olds who are drinking and experiencing freedom for the first time — be honest, would you want to be best friends with you right out of high school? I don’t — and the juniors already have their friendship circles, all live off-campus and have seen enough Americans so you can’t even play the novelty card. And then there’s the ton of traveling which you will inevitably do, seeing as you’re already in Europe and you only have to get Cs in your classes.
Hostels are among the few places where you can really become friends with people who are in the same boat as you are. You have a lot of beers with strangers, get great travel advice (hint: Sandeman’s free tours are excellent), random lessons in geography (The Grenadines is not where Shirley Temple is from unless she’s from the Caribbean), and have uncomfortable encounters which inevitably make for fantastic stories. For example, I was proposed to in Bruges because I am “not bad looking,” (the charmer’s words, not mine) and American. Apparently, the guy wanted to become an American citizen and marrying in is the easiest way to do it. After declining his offer, I had to sleep in the same room as this guy for one more night and trust me, that comforter was on like a strait jacket, or a chastity belt.
Almost as interesting as meeting bizarre people from around the world was the unexpected opportunity to compare myself to the “average American tourist,” which is a chance that we don’t get too regularly inside our Northwestern bubble. Removed from my journalist, film major and other future-waiters-of-America friends, I realize how un-American I am. I don’t like asking for help all that much, I’m far too sarcastic, I’m not particularly loud, I don’t like confrontation, I don’t like beer all that much, and I’m not overtly friendly or always upbeat enough to be properly American. My Italian roommate at Uni says so too.
The hostel is a snapshot of people from all over the world who are in the same place as you — poor and transient — but at the same time from a completely different background. It’s really the only place where people have to hang out with each other even though they’ve only known one another for an hour and probably won’t ever see each other again. Really, it’s what the United Nations wished it was.
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