A spanner in the works, a kick in the teeth

I was going to include an image of a spanner for visual interest then decided that that wouldn't be visually interesting, as it is a spanner, after all. A monkey wrench, now that would have been good, but never mind. Just a minor and largely inconsequential update. We attempted to book hostels today using www.hostelbookers.com, but found out that they only take Visa or Mastercard, even through this third party website. We managed to book four in the end using www.hostelworld.com, and we've decided to book them all on hostelworld, as it seems pretty good, giving you conveniently placed links to (the mafia!)... no, pdfs for each destination you travel to. Pretty nice. We're planning to print them all out before we go as it also includes a summary of your hostel booking.

In fact, we were sort of freaked out when we started using this other site, as it hadn't really occurred to us that other sites would have different reviews of the hostels we'd already chosen. We read about theft, which scared us, but then we reasoned that the reviewers had probably been irresponsible or not used the facilities on offer to secure their items. When checking up on the ratings for St Christopher's at the Winston hotel in Amsterdam, we read about colonies of mice "living" in someone's bed, which made Mojo anxious. Meanwhile I sat there with imaginings of a horrified backpacker unfurling a duvet only to discover a family of mice sat down around a teensy television with their dinner, or packing the family car with tiny mousey luggage for a trip to Slovenia. Anyhow, we heard that most Amsterdam hostels had mouse complaints. I thought that we could put our bags up out of the reach of mice. I don't know how far mice can reach, really, but enough of a way off the floor to pose a challenge to the mice, like a proportional Everest with the spiritual achievement of reaching the bags equivalent to the attainment of mousey Nirvana.



I wholeheartedly apologise for the erratic nature of my train of thought, and for writing it down. We also were concerned about reviews implying smoke-saturated, toxic smells and air throughout the hostel, but then we read somewhere else that as of sometime like July 08 a smoking ban will affect Amsterdam, meaning that hostels will not stink, essentially.

Anyway I'm booking the other hostels on one of my parent's cards (as I'm having to borrow the money for the trip from them anyway) and our hostel fears are assuaged, for now.

Meg