Vicarious Travel

There’s a bit of a communist attitude underlying hostels, and this particularly tends to mean that there are places to swap, borrow, or very cheaply buy books. Sometimes these are travel guides (though guides to the immediate area they usually make you read and return); often they’re just an eclectic collection of whatever the last N guests happened to be reading. I read Bonfire of the Vanities from a hostel library, and David Copperfield; and also a number of forgettable romance novels and chick-lit.

Probably my favorite hostel in this regard is the Bank Street Hostel in Philadelphia. Bank Street has a shabby-cozy nook with several bookshelves and deep sofas, on which one can sprawl and read in a late evening; and I find this more pleasant in many ways than watching television in the lonely comfort of a more luxurious hotel room. There are some very high-end hotels that have studies or reading rooms or libraries (most dramatically, The Library Hotel in New York). But this charming practice seems at the moment to be reserved for lodgings at the top and the bottom of the hotel spectrum; which is a pity. Many a midrange hotel would be humanized and made less tedious by the presence of a small, disorganized, unpredictable library.

Fuji Mountain is a sushi restaurant in Philadelphia (2030 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19103-4411). Actually, it’s several sushi restaurants, stacked on top of one another. When you walk in the front door of what appears to be a fairly ordinary Japanese restaurant, there is a staircase leading upward into darkness; it may not be entirely obvious what it leads to. The answer is: awesome secret sushi.

(And a karaoke bar on the third floor. I’ve never been up there myself.)

What you want is the second floor: a somewhat darker, more intimate restaurant than the one on the first floor, lined with booths rather than tables. It feels more grown-up than the floor below. The menu is also more advanced, with a variety of specialty sushi items that don’t appeal to everyone and that are omitted by many American sushi restaurants. The sake list is long and extremely varied, and includes some varieties of milky sake. As for the quality of the fish, it’s superb and beautifully presented, the best I’ve had in Philadelphia and on a par with what one would find at Mashiko or Shiki in Seattle.

This is a great place to settle in for a couple of hours of eating and drinking. The place has never been crowded in my experience; the service is not in a hurry. (Don’t go there if you are, either — this is not a pre-theater kind of restaurant.) You should also budget fairly generously. The prices are not low, and then there’s the allure of the sake menu on top of that.

A word of warning. If this is your first time at a sushi restaurant that serves natto: don’t. Many places omit it from their menu for good reason, namely that it may strike an American as a gluey, stinky, nasty substance begging to be spit out. I’m all for trying new things and acquiring new tastes, but I found natto so repellent that I had a hard time gagging down the roll. If you really want to experiment, I recommend acquiring some at a specialty store and tasting it in your own kitchen, where you can quickly dispose of the rest without violating the proprieties.

Fortunately, there are lots of other wonderful and unusual things on the Fuji Mountain upstairs menu to try instead.

Cheap accommodations are useful if you’re a student, or on a budget, or traveling so much that you can’t afford that many nights in the Ritz Carlton.

Hostels in particular tend to be communal, offering an opportunity to talk with strangers and get to know your fellow travelers that is not really matched by most other kinds of hotel, where the owners assume you want your privacy. Counter to stereotype, only some of these travelers will be young Australians.

A good hostel offers some kinds of amenity that are hard to come by in other kinds of budget housing. Because they cater to an itinerant crowd, they tend to have not only internet access but also computers by which to get online, so that if you’re traveling without a laptop, you can still get in touch with the rest of the world. Because many of the guests can’t afford to eat at restaurants, hostels sometimes have cafeterias or kitchens. There aren’t televisions in the dorm rooms, but there is often a television lounge and/or game room. Some hostels will even rent out private or family rooms: the cost is more than the price of a dormitory bed, but less than that of most hotel rooms. And there tend to be hostels in places that have no other budget lodging at all, such as the downtown areas of major American cities. In the US, prices tend to run from $17 to $25 for a dorm bed for a night; in continental Europe, $12 to $25; in England, $24-40.

The negatives: hostels can be loud; they offer little privacy; there isn’t always much security for valuable belongings (though some places have lockers); they provide no toiletries (though the nicer ones may have a vending machine for same). They may expect you to bring your own towels or sheets, or conversely may forbid you to do so. Many hostels impose curfews after which you can’t get in, and some have lock-outs during the day, during which their guests must leave so that the hostel staff can clean. If any of these things is a concern, be sure to check up on the offerings at the specific place you’re going.

Aside from the listings below, I can vouch for the HI-Boston and the Globetrotters Inn in San Francisco. Generally speaking, hostels associated with Hosteling International or YHA can be relied on for a very basic level of respectability — that is, they’ll probably be mostly clean and they’ll probably impose essential standards of civility on their guests. Independent hostels range more widely, and can be excellent (see Marmaduke’s, below) or ghastly.

The good news is that you can learn to distinguish the really awful ones: I don’t list any appalling hostels here because I haven’t stayed in one since 1998 or so, and it doesn’t seem fair. You may want to be cautious about hostels that advertise themselves too emphatically as “fun”, since this often translates to “loud at all hours”; those that charge significantly less than the rate for an HI hostel in the same area; those that let guests pay for part of their stay by doing shifts of chores, since this often means that the bathrooms are cleaned inadequately by people with no real motivation; or any that look obviously dirty or smell funny when you walk in.

Best value: Youth Hostel Basel. Clean, spacious, well-lit, located in a nice section of town, and providing a free transit pass that allows the holder to wander the city more or less at will. As hostels go, it really doesn’t get much better. Only a few blocks away is the very fine Basel museum of classical art, which contains the best collection of obscene and erotic Greek vases I have ever seen in one place. What, your bags aren’t packed yet?

Most comfortable: The new Oxford YHA makes an amusing attempt to educate its visitors about the cultural legacy of Oxford: the walls are lined with images of famous Oxford grads and professors from C. S. Lewis to Bill Clinton, and one of the rooms is decorated in a tribute-to-Middle-Earth decor. What’s more, the rooms, though sized for six, do have their own quite clean toilets and separate showers, which means a minimum of standing in line or fretting about whether someone is stealing your possessions while you bathe. The down-side: England is so expensive that a hostel will cost you as much as a single in other parts of Europe. Similarly, Marmaduke’s of York is quite pleasant, but it is cheap only by England standards and it’s also a moderate trudge from the part of town you probably want to see. Not so bad on most occasions, but unpleasant if you’re trying to carry your bags back to the train station. Conversely, be cautious of any London hostel charging less than 15 pounds, as the odds are that it won’t be clean. Outside London, respectable places can be a bit cheaper; see for instance the Globe Backpackers hostel in Exeter.

Most hard-core: Linda’s Bunkhouse, Dutch Harbor, Alaska. No, it’s not really a hostel, and is comparatively comfortable — you get your own room rather than sharing with a bunch of other people. But it caters almost entirely to fishermen, and treats its customers with a kind of cheerful bullying that you wouldn’t expect even from the grimmer sort of hostel. There are big signs everywhere telling you when and where to take off your shoes (at the door), whom you may have in your room (no one but you), when and how you may use the showers, what will happen to you if you do not pay your bill (in cash), etc. It’s all cheerful bullying, and I liked the owners and the other guest-inmates, but it’s not the average sort of lodging.

Loudest after midnight: the Bank Street Hostel, Philadelphia. Philadelphia is not the safest or most comforting of US cities, but if you have to stay somewhere cheap downtown, the Bank Street Hostel is a fair choice. Bank Street itself is little more than an alley, but it is at least in Old City, which tends to generate a lot of night custom and isn’t as eerily deserted as many other parts of the city. It’s a short walk from the nearest subway line, and an even shorter walk from a cafe with free internet access. The down-side is that the hostel is immediately opposite a club. On weekday nights this is not so bad, but on the weekends, you can expect to be kept up to all hours by music, yelling, and the occasional smashing glass.