Musings on Hostels

In Amsterdam, in the spring of 2009, I woke up in my dormitory bed to the sound of puking happening in the room.  It was not the intrusion of sound that woke me - this particular downtown hostel had been impossibly loud the entire evening and night, akin to trying to sleep on the couch in the middle of a party - so, it must have been the peculiarity of the sound that startled me awake.  I had been exploring the city from early morning, when my overnight train rolled in from Berlin, until late evening, when the food and beer slowly dragged me under.  I was laying down on my bed by 7pm, having resolved that this was perfect, because I could wake up in the middle of the night and see this place when people were "out" (I didn't know then that Amsterdam didn't work that way).  But I only woke up long enough to turn away from the puking, which went all down the wall and the side of a trash can (so close!) on its way to the burnt orange carpet of the room, where it would no doubt later appear as nothing more than a speckled pattern, or, if a cleaning agent was used, maybe a slight local paleness.

Instead of staying the next night, as I had planned (and paid for), I checked out and hopped a train for Brussels, then a train for Bruges.  The hostel there was much more to my liking, more my speed, containing a wonderful big open floor plan living/dining/computer area and wonderful cheap beds.  In the evenings, the night's residents bantered in the communal area before heading out to dinner, or drinks.  I met people from both the U.S. and Australia there that I would spend the next three days with.

In my particular 2009 travel experiences - both studying abroad as well as a winding path through northern and western Europe - I encountered few Americans.  But I did twice, and I found myself apologizing for Americans - both the particular ones we had encountered, as well as my admission that their behavior was not uncommon amongst their type - to my foreign companions in both cases.  The first occasion was in Warsaw, and doesn't justify recounting.  The second occasion, in Bruges, involved my apology that an American would puke in a tiny hostel bathroom - a closet really - attached to the dorm room, in the middle of the night, while others were sleeping, and leave the smell there to hang in the air while everyone tried to go back to sleep, and wake up in the morning and offer no apology, but proceed without show of shame - which I will admit is something that may not be apparent but for particular personalities, such as the type that leans constantly against flirtation, as was the case here.  And now, before the thought is lost to me - what are the chances that the Amsterdam puker was American?  I'd say even odds, although there are obviously other cultures that are likely suspects - the Irish, let's say.

In Stockholm, too, we made new friends in the evenings, my German companion offering to pour Jagermeister directly down their throats.  Upon their hesitation, he was compelled to demonstrate how it would work on himself, spilling it all down his front in the process (although plenty got to its intended destination), then standing with a mock grandiosity and drama that he was so good at, anywhere, anytime.  For three nights, we laughed and drank and got into internecine squabbles in our own group, the product of time and place - a dim sense of importance, uniqueness, a profound gift of circumstance for our group.  We were so close, and our relationships so intense, so brief, yet so real - and on some level we understood how rare it was, and how soon it would be over.

The most enduring hostel experience of all comes from Tallinn, Estonia, where our group of fifteen took the entirety of the third floor of a tall, skinny building in Old Town, complete with vaulted ceilings, serpentine staircases, and a table for eight around which fifteen of us crowded to play drinking games.  When we arrived, we listened to our host's description of the top floor, and I ran up the stairs to take the sole upper bunk in a room full of single beds.  I laid there long after everyone else was asleep that first night, peering towards the frosted windows that looked down the narrow street towards the city square.  My sense of incomprehension was matched only by the sense of wonder.  And never before or since that trip have I felt the pain so acutely of losing touch with particular people - the pain of meeting someone, becoming close friends, then finding the friendship vanished completely, a victim of time and circumstance, or in some cases, simply never meant to have been at all.

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The American hostel experience (at least, the one I have had) is the apotheosis of all I have described above, and this has never been illustrated better than last night.  I retired to my hostel in the late evening to read up on my hiking destinations for the next couple days.  Not five minutes later, I was joined on the couch (lots of other seating was free) by a haggard older man - the type who still buys brands aimed at teens and 20-somethings, because he believes it helps him to talk to this demographic - and sure enough, intent on talking to me (despite my alternative "status" to that noted above), about himself, about the beer I was drinking (Una Mas - not my cup of tea - I should have offered him the rest of it), about the book I was reading, ad nauseum.  He successfully chased me away to my room.  For the rest of the evening, night, and morning, I heard - with impossible regularity - sustained attacks of wheezing coughs, microwaving of food, and an aggressive clearing of esophageal phlegm.  Each of these happened twenty or more times, throughout the night (each time woke me up), and of course, just outside my door, judging by the cacophonous nature of the sound.  And where I had thought he had been drunk last night, I was surprised to find him of the same constitution this morning - bug-eyed, staggering slowly towards me, mouth hung open - even after twenty meals to sober himself up.

Of course, one experience does not fairly write a conclusion, or even reliably suggest a tendency, but my other handful of experiences in domestic hostels have all tended towards these sort of experiences, and not those of Europe, which although not uniformly positive (and of course there are a dozen more to tell that fall mostly somewhere in-between) do have the benefit of a satisfactory statistical sample size from which to ascertain that they are not by and large terrible places, or so frequented by terrible people as to render the same result.

Or, seeing as how that guy never went to sleep, maybe he just snuck in off the street?

Musings on Myst, and a bonus link

Emily Yoshida reflects on the legacy of the computer game Myst:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9713372/looking-back-game-myst-20th-anniversary

Much of the article wonders why these sort of games disappeared.  Each of Myst's sequels saw fewer and fewer sales, and there were few, if any similar games from other studios that had any success to speak of.

There is a thread left disconnected - a speculative one on my part, but one that satisfies a certain view of the world that I believe to be robust.  This is from the article:

"The story — which would eventually become so complex it would fill three companion novels — was almost an afterthought. "We're not game designers; we were place designers, so we just started drawing maps, and the maps kind of fueled the story," said Rand.

...

"It was this leapfrog kind of experience, where we would draw a building and say, 'What's in that building, and why is that in the building?' And it just so happened that it was much more satisfying as we built this space to start to build a story behind it. It wasn't necessary, but for some reason in our minds, if there wasn't a story, [the game] lost some kind of credibility."4 It seems ironic in 2013, as games are gaining critical legitimacy arguably because of their increasingly sophisticated narratives, to find out that the developers who had supposedly changed everything in 1993 had to force themselves to justify the addition of a narrative."

I think the answer is right there, like The Purloined Letter, hidden in plain sight.  People didn't respond to Myst because of the story (for sure, I didn't, and I was obsessed - I ran off and created dozens of my own crude maps on paper of my own "worlds"). Myst was successful because people were responding to the aesthetic experience.  The story is actually rather clunky (although I read all three of the novels and they were okay - especially the first one).  But the aesthetic experience is remarkably rich (before you disagree, remember, this was at a time when CGI of this quality was rare).  Not only were several worlds put onto the screen that people could explore on their own, but they weren't quite "right" - they were skewed, tinged with hallucinatory imagery - and I think the reason is right up above in that quote - they built the worlds to trigger an aesthetic response first, and added a story second.  It sounds like I could even reference Malcolm Gladwell's article on Steve Jobs, where he advocates for the "tinkerer" over the "inventor" - artists have always overwhelmingly been tinkerers:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell

I suspect that all the games that followed Myst followed an inventor's mindset - setting out to recreate Myst, or a "better Myst", and not fumbled towards instinctively by a couple of "place designers" who didn't know what they were building.  I am tempted to go so far as to say that Myst works because the formula could not be mistaken for something calculated.

One more thing worth mentioning - I think the music helped, too - so much so that I wonder what Brian Eno thinks of it, since it seems to confirm his theory of the role of ambient music in enhancing the experience of "place".

On an unrelated note: lost with effortless ease to the arcana of the past, Dewey Street Reviews was a forum to post reviews of anything and everything.  It promised a million jokes within the framework of its single joke, and it died a quiet death after two reviews.  It deserved more - this is my mistake alone.  Regardless, Ted Wilson gives exercise to the same joke (and I'm sure plenty of others have before and since, as well - but I found this one) at The Rumpus:

http://therumpus.net/2013/09/ted-wilson-reviews-the-world-200/

Calming Down

When I'm in a familiar place, I'm almost always fine.  I can feel the center of my ego, exactly where I stand, and I feel no disconnect between my inner desire and what I find my physical self actually, subsequently doing.

Elsewhere, which is to say, those places where I am not familiar, I am not at peace - regardless of whether I am enjoying myself.  There is a disconnect between my heart and my body - my feet, my mouth, my ability to maintain patience, clarity, focus.  My actions are rushed - all I feel are the compulsions (indeed, those I have trained myself to possess) to successfully complete objectives.  In this, I experience a sort of out-of-body experience, where I do things too quickly, or too soon, or things I have not yet consciously decided to do.

This happens reliably on vacation, which primes it, I think, by being composed of the absurd contradiction of "hurrying to relax".  I only have a week, I have a drive to make, and logistics to coordinate, and things to check off a master list - what the trip is made of, what I hope to go to actually do.  When I'm not careful, I stride almost breathlessly through hikes that I intended to be relaxing (dare I hope, transcendental) experiences.  All this, because I cannot balance the achieving mindset - necessary to plan it all, to leave, and travel, and arrive - with the mindset of the self - which is in service to nothing else.

The distance between them is not easy to traverse.  But it helps to have some sunshine, a good coffee, people and scenery and music.

Wish me luck!