This is when travelling alone is tough: when travelling with friends and staying at a hostel you split a room, but when travelling alone you go into the dorms. 

With friends, you meet people at breakfast, in the bar, on the couches, usually when they are ready to be presentable. Alone, you meet in the room with ten other beds. You see all the things strangers would never see, and you prejudge people (it’s hard not to prejudge underwear left on the floor of a ten bed dorm)- you see the unmade beds, the erupted bags, the hanging laundry, the strewn socks, the receipts, the not-so-faint smell, the fan that had been left on to combat said smell, and the underwear. 

I haven’t met anyone in my room yet, but when I put my bag under a (hopefully empty so I don’t have some frat guy jump on me in the middle of the night claiming that I’m in his bed) bed, I saw all those things – the only college cliches that were missing were an open can of tuna and a packet of ramen noodles…I immediately thought that I needed to crawl under a rock and pretend it wasn’t happening.

That’s wrong, my first thought was definitely Danny Glover, Lethal Weapon, “I’m too old for this…”

I am so crossing my fingers for cool people…

Additional note: a guy just walked in, ready to claim a bed and was equally disgusted by the underwear, he kicked it away