Hostels and Harvard

BUDAPEST, Hungary — For the uninitiated, a proper hostel functions like a strange social experiment. Throw 25 strangers together in a room full of bunk beds and see what happens.

Sometimes they click — a whole crew from a hostel where I stayed in Nashville went to Memphis together and reunited on Beale Street.

Sometimes not — I left a hostel in Montreal prematurely after a friendly fellow from Cote d’Ivoire (who seemed to be living there permanently) made one too many passes and finally tried to invite himself into my bed one night.

Either way, the experience is more interesting than a budget motel.

I’ve always felt like a little bit of an impostor at hostels. True hostellers carry backpacks and can’t remember the last time they washed their hair. They have acquaintances around the world and ties to nowhere. More often than not, they’re Australians who figure that by the time they’ve made it all the way to the Northern Hemisphere, they might as well see the whole damn thing.

With my Vera Bradley duffel and prearranged travel plans, I’m a tourist to hostel culture as much as I am to whatever city I happen to be in — stopping for a bit but only before getting back on the fast-moving train of my everyday life.

Hostels are in many ways the antithesis of Harvard, where I’m in my third year. The culture of Harvard is defined by ambition and drive. If I just take these classes, cozy up to these professors, network with these alumni, think of how it could help me down the road. But as much as Harvard is about the future, hostels are about the present.

On this vacation, I stayed at Carpe Noctem hostel in Budapest. I found out shortly before I took off I would travel alone — my friend with whom I had planned to travel before we started our study abroad programs in Paris was diagnosed with mononucleosis. Disappointed, I thought of canceling, but the flights were paid, so off I went.

True to its name, Carpe Noctem, or "seize the night," prides itself on being a party hostel. Every night at 8:30, everyone at the hostel gathers and sets off for a night on the town organized by the hostel staff. One too many Hungarian beers later, people stumble back gradually and sleep until midmorning, when they make their way over one of Budapest’s famous thermal baths.

Described as “perfect for when you feel like you should do something touristy but are too lazy to actually do anything,” the baths come before returning to the hostel to resume drinking. In part, tourist attractions are expensive and many hostellers are on a tight budget. But in part, they’re just not interested in seeing yet another Baroque church.

When I visit a city for the first time, I make a checklist of the places I want to hit up and divide them into daily itineraries. I feel a rush of accomplishment when I check off another item on my list. I’ve never been a collector, but I first understood the impulse when I went to Paris on a school trip in fifth grade, back when all the monuments issued commemorative coins that you could buy for 10 francs, and I had to buy every single one and compare my stack with my classmates’.

The coins have long since disappeared, and in the age of Google Images, I never buy postcards anymore. But the urge to collect places  remains, for me, synonymous with traveling. Who knows if or when I’ll be back in Budapest, I repeated to myself over the past few days, so I have to wait in line to tour Parliament, trek up hundreds of stairs to see the views from the Citadel, and try the absurdly over-priced apple torte at the legendary Hungarian pastry shop Gerbeaud.

I’m glad I did all those things a tourist is supposed to do. I walked every corner of the city, and I loved it.

But sometimes I wonder if my fellow hostellers might be right, if a late-night conversation over a beer with new friends from Belgium might not be just as worthwhile as climbing the tower of St. Steven’s church.

Am I perhaps bringing too much of the Harvard ethos with me, even as I’m going abroad to escape it? The apple torte was mediocre, but lying in the Rudas baths, surrounded by naked old Hungarian women, is something I’ll never forget.

This report comes from a journalist in our Student Correspondent Corps, a GlobalPost project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.