Our Hostile Hostel

(submission by Matteo)

If you find yourself headed to Firenze in the future, you should be very excited! It's a beautiful city, and there are plenty of budget hotels and hostels for the thrifty traveler. One word of caution: avoid EuroStudentHome Hostel. It looked fantastic online, but when we arrived, the dirty punks running the place informed us that they were overbooked. Not to worry, they could offer us a private apartment with plenty of room and no roommates, just a few minutes away. We made the hike over and were surprised at what we found.

To begin with, the apartment reeked. We found it painful to breathe in the hot, unfiltered air. Sure, there were windows, but right outside the windows were dumpsters. As it was terribly late at night, we decided to just sleep in these awful conditions, but not for long. After we all dozed off, garbage trucks came by to unload the dumpsters. I'm pretty sure the glass-bottle dumpster was unloaded for 3 hours non-stop. In the morning, the groggy Camajalini family (sans Bella, who lived it up in a hotel with air conditioning and a cleaning service) returned to the original hostel to complain. We Americans got our way, and we were moved to a more acceptable location.

Again, neither air conditioning or even air were available this weekend in Firenze, but it was better than the apartment, so we were okay with what we got. There were a few minor setbacks: no locks on the doors, one bed that was broken in half, a random Argentinian backpacker in our room when we arrived. Sophia worked it all out, though. The hostile hostel employees built us a new bed and showed the Argentinian to another room. In the end, the situation could have been much worse. We could have been sleeping in a tent. In the fiery pits of Hades.