Lessons from traveling abroad: don't always trust review websites

My hostel in Northern Ireland left a lot to be desired.  Between masturbating roommates leading to me sleeping in mildewy staff quarters to seeing the staff constantly mistreated and thinly veiled racism from the man running the place, I thought it was high time to let the world know.  HostelWorld that is.

I left a review detailing the situations I found myself in and the conversations I was unfortunate enough to overhear, then repeated the same thing on TripAdvisor (where a man claiming to be the owner belittled every negative review left for him).

Here is the big lesson of the day: Review sites like HostelWorld and TripAdvisor apparently let the owners have a lot of control over the reviews.

Lessons from traveling abroad: negotiating your way out of a bad situation

By far the worst hostel I stayed in during my travels was in Northern Ireland.  The accommodations weren't particularly awful, but the environment soon turned out to be bewildering and unsafe…

My first night I went to bed before any of my roommates, despite it being well after midnight.  There was quite the ruckus outside the window from a group of guys partying in the courtyard.  Eventually the ruckus died down and I was hopeful to finally get some sleep…until the ruckus came in my room.  Clearly the group of guys from the courtyard were my roommates.  I lay still and hoped none of them would notice me, remembering what I'd learned from previous nights in hostels where I had all male roommates.

No such luck.

One of them shushed the others suddenly and another exclaimed "Holy f*** is that a girl?"

Lessons from traveling abroad: How to meet people and make friends

When I arrived in Interlakken, I was suffering from a serious case of homesickness so I was thrilled when a girl stood in the middle of our dorm and announced,

"Does anyone want to go hike up a mountain on Friday?"

Everyone else kind of just looked at each other and basically ignored her but I was game, not only for a hike in a few days but also for everything else: "grocery" shopping (code for buying wine, chocolate, and cheese), half priced drinks at the underground beach party, cooking dinner together in the kitchen, meeting other Americans, giant chess, lounging in the not-so-secret hammock room…

Because Suzy knew the secrets to making friends on the move:

How to sleep in a new place

Jet lag.  All travelers know and despise it.  We've all heard the common advice of keeping yourself awake until it is time to go to sleep in your new time zone, but how many of us actually succeed at this?  Even more, how many people who have the self-discipline to do so actually feel bright-eyed and bushytailed in the morning?

Bushy tale? Check!  Bright eyes?  Errrrrrr.....
Photo credit: Doug