Monday, September 29, 2008

Japanese Hostel = Junior high all over again

I:m staying at a hostel tonight in Nagoya. The hostels here are really strict. It:s like living in your parents: house all over again.

There:s an 11pm curfew when the front doors close. After that you:d better check into another place for the night.

The front door doesn:t open until 7am. If you gotta leave before that, I don:t know what happens. I guess you could try to break out or jump out the 2nd story window (if it opens)? I tried to ask the lady at the front desk if I:m going to burn to death if there:s a fire (half out of jest), but she didn:t understand me so that joke burned to the ground.

There:s only 1 communal bath in the place (for each sex of course). You can only shower between 5:30pm and 10:00pm. You cannot shower in the morning. Did you read that? You cannot shower in the morning. What the hell huh? Good thing I normally shower at night anyway. Also, if you didn:t notice yet, the shower closes 1 hour before the hostel does, so if you plan on going out in the evening and then heading back in, you have to head in at 9:30pm at the latest to just get a shower in before you have to wait until the next evening. The people that run the hostel must think everyone has Asian sweat glands (as in, doesn:t smell in the daytime).

There are no elevators, and I:m on the 4th floor. Since I:m so strong and manly, I don:t have a problem with 4 floors of walking up with my bags, but there are other people out (I know it:s hard to believe) that are not as strong as I am that are carrying heavier bags. I feel bad for them.

There:s only 1 key to each room. My room happens to be Japanese style, so we:re all sleeping on tatami mats, which is cool, but there:s up to 6 people in each room. Sharing a key with 5 strangers? It:s not as bad as it sounds because the last person is supposed to leave the key at the front desk when they leave the hostel, but think of how many times you:re going to have situations like this:
1. i:m the only one in the room, i run downstairs to drop the key off and leave and one of my roommates is coming up the stairs to enter the room. They don:t know that I have their key, so they will have to go up and down 3 times with their baggage (please remember there are no elevators).
2. i:m the only one in the room, i leave with the key to go shower, my roommates come by, they don:t know I:m in the shower but they can:t get in the room because nobody is there.
3. this is also a safety hazard, because you have to open the door if somebody knocks because you don:t know whether the person on the other side of the door belongs there or not until you open the door and talk to them. This means that anybody can go knock on anybody:s door and the people inside MUST open the door, no matter what. Cue the creepy guys knocking on girls rooms.

So the question I keep asking myself everytime this happens to me is: Is all this hassle worth saving $20 a night? In the beginning I thought "sure!", but now I:m on the fence. The only real reason why I love hostel rooms is because I get to meet people by the nature of it.

2 Comments:

Blogger Heather H. said...

I am loving all of the thought that went into the post. I feel like you must have taken a couple hours to a day thinking about all of the stuff you wrote in your post. LOL! It must have taken you a long time to write.

September 30, 2008 at 9:23 PM  
Blogger Jimmy said...

Thanks Heather :) Glad you enjoy reading it.

October 4, 2008 at 4:17 AM  

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