2010 Tartu-Odessa-Tbilisi, Part6 / (Warsaw)

Text: Me
Photos and other stuff: We



Pleading for the defence of staying at a hostel in Warsaw (a hindsight)



/Alas! Hostels! A mystery you are to me.
Once I was in Oslo. A work trip. I was accommodated in a hotel. It was quite a shock. Middle class, up to the selection of tapestry and smell. I wondered for long whether the odeur of the room is part of the deal, and desired by some, or a weird heritage of previous lodgers. Heavy, peculiar, a very sweet smell. Couldn’t breathe, being afraid of inhaling a toxic amount of air fresheners, couldn’t smoke to kill it either, so the sign said, just next to a tasteless painting of flowers. Impression amplified, as this was the gist of all the places I stayed during that long pre-booked trip. I evacuated to the cold Oslo evening, lightly dressed, airline had lost my suitcase. I smoked and walked around the corner of the hotel building to find shelter from the wind. And I saw it. There was a hostel on the first floor. I was suddenly smoking behind a huge window of a hostel, just below my hotel. I saw some youth inside, an administrator wearing dreadlocks, and I felt a powerful feeling of misplacement in the world, a misplacement and injustice what might be felt by a little boy with no means in front of a showcase of a candy shop (around nineteen thirties, for milieu). These people, doing their simple evening things, maybe even boring things, at a place where they probably just slept for money, these people seemed for me, an abashed boy behind the window, smoking in the light snowfall and shivering from cold, like a unreachable world of abundance for Cinderella.
In Vienna I once tried to go to a hostel. But it was fully booked and I was sent to a cheap hotel instead. I watched those all prepared backpackers arriving, holding their LPs and having a reservation. I admit, I was somewhat proud of not having a reservation, of not having a compulsion to reach somewhere at all, but it sucked to leave. A year ago, I asked the price for somebody in Tallinn - for some tourist I picked up on the street with my offer to help – from one of the Old Town hostels. A simple question asked with shining eyes and I was gulping down everything I saw. I can remember entering another hostel in the Old Town, for as far as two steps, but I didn’t even have an excuse to get me as deep as the third or – fourth step inside. Clumsy me.
And, actually, She, when we met, was living in a beautiful art noveau building which had a hostel on the first floor. Now it is amusing to think how she couldn’t understand at all - whilst the first visits I had to her place -, how bewildered she was about why on earth I so badly wanted to see that hostel from inside. I was trying to make up excuses, reasons, whatever, let’s go and see if people will sit and play guitar in the evening! or could we go and check the prices? Cheap excuses. This hostel thing disconcerts me. I lose all my charm and self-confidence when things get close to hostel issues. A mystery, all those voices on the background, voices of my friends who casually mention all those reasons, good reasons, to enter a hostel, good reasons, like sleeping at one or a few, or living at those establishments down under, or wherever, or telling stories without even emphasising on – for me so obviously important! – setting of a hostel, be it washing laundry at their friends hostel, so casually they mention it, or sleeping in a bunk which has curtains which make a feeling of lying in a box, or getting stuffed with food by the Japanese.
It’s like reading about blow job from a book. I’m a virgin./