My Week: A Hostel In Jerusalem
...What I was presented with on the first day looked exactly like what I gave to the cat on Boxing Day after my party - though I gave more meat to the cat....
Ruth Kaye, continuing her travels in Israel, finds the guests in a Jerusalem hostel are far more interesting than the food.
For more of Ruth's travels in all parts of the world please click on My Week in the menu on this page.
By a clever deduction processes I decided that the most sensible option would be the only hostel mentioned on both the recent ‘Hostelz.com’ website and in my 1994 “lonely Planet’ guidebook. I know I should maybe have ignored such outdated advice but from past experience I know the “Lonely Planet” book to be accurate and honest in its descriptions of accommodation, as it is given by fellow travellers.
The descriptions on the website, on the other hand are generally entirely misleading as they have been compiled by the owners of the hostels themselves and therefore they are painted in a rather over-glamorous way. The clean, spacious bedrooms with fancy bedspreads on the beds and carefully arranged flowers on tables next to them look nothing like the rooms you get and the facilities they claim to have are often non-existent. For example, in Petra, Jordan, the wide, clean rooms with flowery duvets turned into small rooms with chipped wall paper. Nor was there any internet access, swimming pool, free transportation, car park (not that I wanted one) or free evening meal, as had been guaranteed on the website.
This time the description was more accurate. The price was cheap, there was free internet access (and quicker than the one at work) and a free evening meal. While the internet was quicker than in school, though, the free evening meal was the same fried rice, ratatouille (ok until they started mixing this with red meat) and meatless chicken. I think the chef was either eating all the chicken breasts himself or else he was buying the birds at a reduced cost due to the fact that there was nothing much left on them.
What I was presented with on the first day looked exactly like what I gave to the cat on Boxing Day after my party - though I gave more meat to the cat. Still, it was good to gather round the stove in the living room with the other residents every night at 6 pm and exchange stories and make friends Actually I think I might have left Jerusalem sooner had it not been for the interesting people I met in the hostel.
Although I had already seen everything I wanted to the second time round in Jerusalem, once I had done my circuit of the country, I lingered on an extra night just to chat to the other guests. The dorm rooms were dark and cramped but the beds were comfy and all I did was sleep there and I achieved this without a problem so have no complaints.
The hot water did run 24 hours as promised. However it came out of the shower head only in drips so I sat on the floor and showered under the tap. Again I have no complaints because it warmed me up and cleaned me which is all I needed. I am used to roughing it a bit when travelling and it’s worth saving a few shekels to extend the miles you can journey. Also, if I stayed in some grand hotel in a single room, there would not be such a good chance to meet new people and maybe the bedroom would be so cosy that I would never go out anywhere, thus defeating the whole purpose of the exercise.
Anyway, of note among the other guests are the following: a Turkish girl whose name I still don’t know. She’s doing a PhD at Leicester University on the developing peaceful relationships in the Middle East. She seemed extremely intelligent had been interviewing important sounding professors and politicians to complete her research. She was very interesting to talk to and I was honoured when she chose me among all the other guests, to attend the first ever Arab-Israeli stand-up comedy show on my return visit to Jerusalem (this was very funny and well-worth tearing myself away from the homely stove on my last night).
The Australian journalist who recommended the intriguing hostel I stayed in in Tel Aviv and who also revealed the mystery of the inaccurate hostelz.com descriptions (apparently there are tick boxes for each facility and many hostel owners are not aware of the meanings of the English words for the facilities so they just tick them all - the more boxes, the more guests.)
A Scottish guy doing a PHD in Russian cinema. Apparently Tel Aviv is a big centre for this.
A half Egyptian/half-Australian guy who works for the immigration authorities in Melbourne who passed on useful websites to help me work out how I might wangle a few points to score a place in his sunny country.
Many Korean Christians; especially the very loud, over-enthusiastic man who tried to practice his English on me and made me sit next to him at breakfast and dinner time. He has a house on the outskirts of Jerusalem but was staying in the hostel during his month-long pilgrimage to holy sites in the centre. One day he took me, another Korean Christian and a Japanese girl, Naoko, up the Mount of Olives. While it was interesting to take advantage of his vast knowledge of the area and learn many things I could not have discovered without a guide, it was very frustrating to have to look in every church we came to on the way up the mountain.
Moreover, his English was only Elementary 3 level and the other Korean who was trying to translate was pre-intermediate 1. In church number six my feet got too wriggly and I abandoned the tour due to ‘fatigue’.
