Tag: Amalfi Coast

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The Traveler’s Dilemma: Hostels Versus Hotels

Originally posted for MyFunkyTravel.com

When I booked my weekend trip to the Amalfi Coast as a Florence study abroad student, I figured I was making the obvious choice when I chose a hotel instead of a hostel. The idea of a hostel brought forth horrific film images of dingy basements, fake blood, and conniving Europeans. However, upon stepping into a dingy econo-lodge reminiscent motel, equipped with stray hairs and sour milk, it quickly became apparent which was the better choice, especially when checking out the modern, chic, and youth-friendly hostel down the road.

As in all situations, one isn’t always better than the other, however when it comes to backpacking, hostels are bound to be your better bet with a little bit of background research beforehand. So why are these colorful cohabiting pseudo-homes so much cooler and more fun than your run-of-the-mill hotel?

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Hotel Verona in Milan, Italy

1. Hostels keep you social. Unless you specially request a private room, normally, hostels bunk you with a bunch of other rowdy travelers like yourself – they usually have between four to sixteen beds per room, although some can range up to 100 beds. For some, this may be a turn-off, but for young backpackers, especially those flying solo, it’s the easiest way to grab a travel buddy and make international friends for the next time you hit the road. What better way to make friends with someone than to brush your teeth next to them?

2. You’ll meet more “travelers” than “tourists” at hostels. When staying at hotels, you’re bound to run into some loud little kids, stuck-up tourists, and confused vacationers. However, at hostels, it’s a sure bet that you’ll be with other adventurous backpackers that you’ll have more in common with and can stay in contact with for years to come. The average age of one staying in a hostel is between 18 and 26, according to Rick Steves, however there is no average age or demographic of one staying in a hotel.

3. Hostels add an interesting new level of surprise to your travels. A hotel pretty much always looks like a hotel, especially if you’ve opted for a chain or you don’t have the dollars to drop on a luxury hotel. However, hostels tend to be more optimized with amenities, activities, and décor related to the city you are actually staying in.

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Image of Generator Hostel Dublin, Ireland, Photo Courtesy of generatorhostels.com

4. Hostels tend to run much cheaper. Because you usually share a room with other travelers and they are geared towards younger travelers, hostels are almost always much more cost-effective than hotels, especially if no loyalty points are involved or you’re only staying for a night or two. The average nightly price of a hostel is only between $20 and $40. If you can part with Egyptian cotton sheets and private bathrooms, then the hostel price is worth it.  

5. Hostels tend to be locally owned and operated. If you’re pissed that your room is sub-par and you complain to the desk staff at the local Holiday Inn, the college dropouts at the front desk probably don’t really care. However, when you’re upset about an issue with your hostel, the person you are complaining to (or praising) at the front desk, most likely owns the whole place and they will personally help you handle your issue and can easily change hostel policies to avoid that issue at a later date.

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Image of Goli and Bosi Hostel Split, Croatia, Photo Courtesy of whatwedoissecret.org

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On My Way Home

Living on the Jersey Shore, surrounded by 24 hour diners, dark-haired greaseballs, and leopard print yoga pants, I couldn’t really be much further from Italy, where well-dressed people enjoy shots of expresso and kiss on street corners. I think nostalgically about my time in Italy daily, often wondering how I ended up back here surrounded by the congested parkway and the smog of the nearby city. Often, it feels like that was another world, another lifetime, and it becomes more and more difficult to remind myself that was me there and not a body double. However, during every afternoon run on the boardwalk, gazing out over the pink sky and quietly whispering winds, I sometimes forget that I’m here at all and instead, I’m taken back to being that carefree, kind-of-dirty kid one year ago.

The Jersey Shore beach doesn’t really look like any of the beaches I ever saw in Italy did. It doesn’t look like the spotted mountainside beach towns of Cinque Terre, nor does it possess the sunny winding roads of Sorrento or the wilderness-ridden cliffs of Capri. The air isn’t as light and clean here and the people aren’t as happy and slow-moving. Hell, even the water here doesn’t have the turquoise dreamy tides of the Mediterranean. However, seaside smells and salty air are the same no matter what town you’re in, and the little towns on the Shore are no different. Sometimes when running on the boardwalk, I almost want to close my eyes and, just for a second, remember my first weekend trip to Cinque Terre.

The more places that you go, the more that you realize how remarkably similar many of them are. Don’t get me wrong here – the world is a quirky place, reminiscent of a family of black sheep where each cousin is a little different from the next. There is no place in the world with the tres chic of Paris, the art splendor of Florence, or the loom of Budapest. However, they all have sister qualities within them nevertheless. New Orleans is the dirty, rogue sister of Savannah, San Francisco, the big-city hipster brother of Seattle. And when you happen to run into one of these unexpected family members, even in a place as unsexy as the Jersey Shore, it’s always a welcome reminder of the home that once was.

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Dancing in Sorrento, Spilling in Capri

I’m standing with my feet on the edge of this cliff in Positano. Looking down at the water, I feel like my heart is about to jump out of my bikini, especially when I think about jumping my whole self from this stupid cliff. Unfortunately, it all looked a lot less daunting from the ground. I consider counting to five, but I feel like I’ve already been standing here an embarrassingly long time. I turn my brain off, close my eyes, hold my breath, plunge. This is the moment where I feel my feet tingling at the free fall, out in the open air, that I realize cliff jumping is very reminiscent of studying abroad. 

Amalfi Coast– Day 1

After a seven-hour red-eye bus ride from Florence to Sorrento on the Amalfi Coast with Bus2Alps, Andrea, my roommate and Italian partner-in-crime, and I collapse on our sad-looking twin beds stuffed in a room along with a set of bunks in Hotel Londra, which kind of reminds me of a place people in hiding might go to. However, since it’s 2:00 am and we have to wake up in four hours to get on a bus to Capri, the little beds with the grandma covers might as well be my king bed in Long Branch, New Jersey. About a half an hour after we collapse, our then-unknown roommates from Rome stumble in as well and crawl into their bunk beds.

The next morning, we get up around 6:00 am and stumble onto a bus to get to the marina in Sorrento and to take us on the ferry to Capri. As usual on these trips, I want to sleep so badly on these few precious moments of downtime but I can’t help but keep my eyes open to spot the little pink-yellow-blue houses pressed together and perched on the edges of cliffs. By the time we are on another boat after landing in Marina Grande in Capri, I’m wide awake as we circle the tiny island.

We sail past the Blue Grotto, the Green Grotto, and many of the other grottos (although I still don’t really get what a grotto is) as well as a tiny fisherman statue on a large cliff which welcomes visitors to Capri. Soon, we can see the Rocks of Faraglioni in the distance. Seeing them on various postcards is one thing. But actually sailing through the Love Rock and seeing couples kiss under it, hoping the promise of eternal love from it is true, is quite another thing altogether.

Back in Capri, we hike up an obscene amount of steps, where I can hear students mumbling, “I need to stop smoking,” to Anacapri, which the top of the island. Here, homemade sandals and limoncello are made for touristed-out prices. We hop on a nearly-vertical chairlift for a measly seven euro, in which an Italian man literally pushes you onto a one-person chair with a rusty iron bar to keep you in as you float to the top. We breeze by little cottages and gardens, stray cats and Virgin Mary statues.

Here, we peer over the edge to see the straight-down drop, which goes straight down. One sneeze and you are done for. We can see a 360 degree view of Capri, making the island seem like a tiny place, yet nonetheless colorful. I can see people heading to the beach and eating some gelato and walking hand-in-hand, reminding me that this is a place that people save up for years to visit, to get married. Here we are on a whim and it’s obvious how lucky we are.

Claudia and Rosie, two other study abroad students we met earlier in the day, meet us at the top of the island. Rosie and I hop a “FORBIDDEN” sign (in which an Italian attendant helps us actually open the gate) and we scramble through some brush onto a small beaten path which takes us outside of the initial fence and truly on the edge of these cliffs.

Later, we take a “topless taxi,” basically a convertible, down from Anacapri back to the marina and the beach at the bottom. Andrea, myself, Rosie, Claudia, and Nick, another person we picked up on the way, hold our breath as the little taxi zips through the tiny streets that hug the sides of the mountains. The toothless taxi driver either has to pull over when another car comes by or squeeze by anyhow (his usual choice). All the while, vespas speed by in and out of the cars. Making it out alive, we sit on the rocky beaches and cool off in the blue-green water, so deep yet clear that I can see the schools of fish parading by.

That night, our group goes to a restaurant in Sorrento, where we walk to from our hotel on the even tinier streets. The owner, a fat Italian father which his shirt undone to his belly button, gives us his homemade vinaigrette. While we wait for our meals, we quietly explore the sitting area outside, which borders a tiny garden and well with little icicle lights and a woman singing in the corner.

After dinner, we walk to the Olde English Inn, an outdoor bar. Even though we’re operating on four hours of sleep, everyone gets more alive from wine and beer and the big dinner and soon we are dancing to 90’s hits. One of our roommates who we have befriended, a sweet blonde girl named Claire from Minnesota, ushers the tall Italian men to dance with us with a smile always on her face. We all drift easy, squished on the dance floor, until the booze wears off and we are wishing for those grandma beds in the hotel a few blocks down the road.

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Jump.

Amalfi Coast– Day 2

The next morning, we’re all a little better rested and we get on the bus a little easier before heading to Positano. Before we get on another boat in Positano, we kill some time by eating gelato (again) and watching a wedding go by and listening to the music from outside the church. Once the boat comes and we hop on, we dock by a secluded beach and all of the students pour out and jump into the ocean to swim to the shore and proceed to climb up a cliff before toppling off back into the Mediterranean.

After I do the medium jump (there are three), I’m playing in the water with Claudia, Rosie’s roommate. We’re splashing around like seven-year-olds and watching actual seven-year-olds, who I think are the boat driver’s kids, effortlessly jump off cliffs a good 20 feet higher than ours without a second thought.

It is here that I realize that most likely, I will never be in Positano ever again. Never again will I be able to say that I climbed this cliff and jumped off. So, as the last one in line, I climb the cliffs again. To get to the highest point, you must shimmy up some rock, in which it is necessary to have another person help you over or else you are prematurely going over that cliff. Thankfully, since I am last, an old Italian man who happens to be wandering by (?) lifts me over like I am his own daughter. He doesn’t speak a word of English but luckily sees I am stuck from the distraught look on my face.

It is standing here, teetering off this cliff and the last one in line, that I kind of figure that jumping is a lot like leaving your friends and family to study abroad.

At first, you think, Why bother? I’m perfectly safe and happy sitting here in my own ocean, my own space. Then, when you see others doing it– blazing fiercely outside their comfort zone and emerging even brighter than before, it’s like this little lightbulb implants itself in your mind, whispering just quiet enough, that you know, you could do this too. As you climb the rock and mentally prepare yourself, you look down, and you start to lose your nerve. You think how easy it would be to turn around, to go back to where it is safe. For whatever reason, though, you truck on anyway, and then you reach the edge, you close your eyes, and you jump. 

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This is the Life.

Before I got here, I’ll admit that I felt pretty cool to be spending a semester in Italy– pretty ballsy to leave my friends and family and head across Europe for what seemed like an eternity; three and a half measly months. Well let me explain something. When you are sitting on your ass all summer watching grass grow, three months seems like an awfully long time. When you are living in Florence and you already have the next six weeks of your life filled with trips to places you have only read about in books, three and a half months is suddenly next to nothing, and I assume it’ll feel like the same when I am bundled in a winter jacket and sitting on a plane with tears running down my face because I am on my way back to New Jersey.

Studying abroad also brings you down quite a few notches from being an overachiever to just another face in the crowd. At school, people tell me how much I do and how challenging it must be, yada yada yada. Here in Florence, I feel like the stoner in the back of the classroom as the students talk about the places they have traveled, the things that they have seen, the languages that they speak. I can barely stay awake in my nine am Italian class and most of the places I have been to consist of a pool bar and inclusive drinks.

Even people that you wouldn’t expect seem to have done it all. A frat boy named Michael who was rocking some sort of barbecue frat tee and bright sneakers told me that when he wasn’t getting drunk at school with his brothers and having mixers with ditzy sorority girls, he was doing an archaeological dig in Belize and spent his winter break touring across China. This semester, once his schooling in Florence is over, he is backpacking across Europe through Christmas with a marine.

When I first got here, even though it was all so very exciting and interesting, I couldn’t imagine ever staying for much longer than the three months that already was. However, over time, we got to know our Bus2Alps tour guides, which made me see it a little differently. All of these guides, who are in their mid-twenties and seem to come from all over, studied abroad in various places as undergrads and now intern with the company to promote during the week and then lead tours on the weekends.

One of our guides, Tiernan, said that in high school, she studied Latin because she was sick of Spanish. In college, she followed it up with Italian, because it was another romance language. She studied abroad in Siena while she was an undergrad, even though she barely made it fit in with her seasons of soccer back in the States. Even though she figured she would never have a change to come back to Italy, she ended up attending grad school for graphic design in Florence. Now, she works as Bus2Alps chief graphic designer, and even though she makes little-to-nothing for profit, she has seen places in Europe that people dream about… for free. She won’t stay in Italy forever, maybe just another year or two, and her mother warns her she better not marry an Italian. But while her friends rot away in cubicles in the States, typing away on computers and probably living with their parents, Tiernan bar hops in Sorrento and hikes Cinque Terre and white water rafts in Croatia. Doesn’t sound like too bad of a gig to me.

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