......holidays are neat.......

This last week was October holiday at school, which means a delightful week-long vacation from school. The first half was spent at a teacher's conference in Beijing. All of the teachers from the five different international schools in China met in Beijing for a few days of workshops. After the conference, I stayed in Beijing for an extra day with some other teachers to do some shopping. While there, I had my first legitimate hostel experience (the first "hostel" I ever stayed in was actually a bunch of apartments this guy owned that he rented out to various people). My first hostel stay gave me quite the story.

The hostel itself was actually really nice. It had a nice lounge area and a large courtyard outside with lounge chairs and a small restaurant. While we were checking in, they informed us that there were some issues with the dorm room we had booked for all four of us. They were then going to upgrade us to two rooms with two single beds each-so it was more hotel style than dorm bunk-bed style we had originally booked. The guy in charge started to lead us to the rooms, but my roommate and I were told to wait. After our other two friends left, we were told to wait because our room was in a different area. The lady then proceeded to explain that there was a bed broken in one of the rooms so we would be sharing the dorm room we originally booked with two other strangers. My roommate discussed this with her for awhile, trying to find out if there were any other rooms available. Eventually the guy returned and said that bed was not, in fact, broken, but the two people there had decided to extend their stay so they had to split us up. He ended his explanation with "your friends have better rooms."

To which my roommate replied, "I know."

So we went to the dorm room we were supposed to have and then called the other two to tell them what was going on. She then went back to the desk to explain that we didn't want to be with other people (because we're typical Americans), and we wanted the room we originally booked. So they decided to move the two people out of the dorm room and into the hotel style room. We would have felt guilty except for the fact that the other room was extremely nice so they definitely benefited from our stranger avoidance.

The only problem with this new plan was that the other two people staying in our room weren't currently at the hostel, and we weren't sure when they would return. We left to eat dinner, hoping they would be back by the time we came back.

When we got back, only one of the other girls had returned. We went to the room to find an elderly Chinese lady packing up her stuff to move to the other room. She then informed us that she had been enjoying that room for the past month and wondered how long we were staying. We all stared at our shoes as somebody mumbled "one night." We waited for about another hour, but the other girl still hadn't come back yet. So, we all went to bed. My roommate and I got to share a tiny single bed since the other bed still had the girl's stuff on it. Someone finally came in around 11 and started packing up the stuff while exclaiming how weird and strange the whole thing was. All of us pretended to be asleep. After she left, the housekeeping person came by and asked if he could change the sheets. Someone mumbled yes as we pretended that we were all still "asleep" and he changed the sheets. After that rather long process, he left and we all popped up because, of course, none of us had actually been sleeping.

So we finally got to sleep around 11:30 and the rest of the evening was uneventful. Though, when I woke up in the morning and looked around at the stark, white walls with no windows and the cold tile floor, I wondered if this was what it was like to wake up in prison. That aside, the hostel was really nice and besides the room mix-up, it was a good experience.

The rest of the day was spent shopping at the market and eating large amounts of western food before heading back to home and off my grown-up teachery responsibilities.