HOSTEL NIGHTMARE

So, I recently went on a trip to Italy (if you haven't seen, I've started posting my vlogs over on my YouTube channel ). My four friends and I first flew from London to Rome.

Now, it's important to know that we're five college students on budgets. So naturally we started looking for hostels to stay in using hostelworld.com. We found the cheap and centralized Walter's Guest House.

"Walter Guest House offers a typical italian breakfast, with milk, coffee or tea, plumcakes,small tart,biscottate slices,bread toasted, jam marmalade, honey, and nuts chocolate cream Nutella. The breakfast is self service available from 7.00 AM to 10.00 AM . 

Walter Guest House is 2 blocks off the main Station Termini, 10 minutes from all the main attractions, like the Colloseum, Piazza Venezia, TREVI Fountain, Spanish Steps and the Pantheon. The Vatican City is a little further down the road and you will have no problem as public transport is just under the house. For the night owls, we have a disco just a stones throw away, round the corner the main Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and if you want to forget your problems go and have a drink down at the many Irish pubs that are a stones throw away from the house. If you have problems sightseeing, we will try and get you infomation and tips for the day.  

Walter Guest House has 5 rooms. All our bedrooms are quiet and comfortable, even for senior guests on a romantic trip in downtown Rome.We offer:
: We give you the doors room keys so there is no curfew.
: free use of pc internet,available also wireless,skype,msn
: free use of lockers cabinet , television set ,hair-dryer, A/C air conditioner. 
: free cleaning daily of bedroom housekeeping.
: free use of the common kitchen furnished ,microwave,stoves,common refrigerator .
: supplement 5 euros per person for bedsheets and bath towels,blanckets.
: free dispenser of cool water and coffe,cappuccino,tea lemon,chocolate available all day long.
: free fresh orange squeezy juice , available all day long .
: use of washing machine , only 5 euros 1 way for washing and drying .,
: lugagges storages after the check-out,ask the staff. 

Check in from 12:00 to 23:00 .
Check out before 11:00 .
The check-in time is from 12.00 to 23.00 ,so arrival after 23.00 there is a small supplement 10 euros per person for the service reception afterhours. 
Payment upon arrival by cash, credit cards. (This property may pre-authorise your card before arrival). 
Taxes not included - occupancy tax 3.50 EUR per person per night.
Supplement 5 euros per person for bedsheets and bath towels,blankets.
Cancellation policy: 48 hours before arrival. 
Breakfast included.
General:

No curfew. Child friendly.
Non smoking guests only are acceptable" (via Hostelworld.com)

Now that sounds pretty alright, right? All that for a total of €300 (that's €60 each for three nights). Plus it's pretty close to central Rome (I think it's about a 15 minute walk to the Trevi Fountain). But of course we looked over the hostel world rating, 6.7, not horrible. So with a €50 deposit, we booked it.
Three of us were set to arrive sometime between 7-8PM, while the others would get in a few hours later. To make this easier, I'm gonna name my friends. So it was me with Maggie and Carmen and then later Charlotte and Lydia would arrive.

I was pretty content with getting there early, it meant a bit of evening exploration and our first Italian dinner. But it also meant we were tasked with getting checked-in at the hostel. We decided to take a train from the airport to the area--Roma Termini was the station we ended up at.

This was a fairly easy system and didn't take that long. Then we set of with our trusty Google Maps to find Walter's Guest House (WGH, as I will refer to it). We figured it wouldn't be that hard as this is the picture of it when you google it:

That seems like, even at night, it would be pretty obvious, right. I mean granted, when you look closer it's obvious that it wouldn't actually be this building but at least it would be right around it. Well...no. 

This is closer to the actual appearance. Now this looks fine...in the daytime. 

At night was something waaayyyy different. It was significantly more terrifying. But, after about 20-30 minutes of searching we decided to stick it out and go in. Or at least, ring the buzzer. Once inside it looked very much like a the beginning of a horror film--or at least the rising action point in the story. You know the part, where the characters go into the haunted house with the notion of "what could go wrong"? At least...that's what it was like in my head. 

But it was roughly 8-9 at night and we needed somewhere to stay so we looked for the actual hostel. The whole building was actually a bunch of individual places so it took us a bit of searching before we found the right place. 

The door opened to a man in (what looked like) his late 40s who spoke very little English--which we weren't necessarily surprised about, being in a foreign country. Going in we could see it was a very small place--not actually what I'd call a hostel but I suppose the term "Guest House" should've been a hint about that. It was a narrow hall that lead into a not-much-bigger kitchen. A small two-person table sat near the grime-covered counter and by a VERY ancient looking desktop computer that probably couldn't run more than one program at a time (Internet Explorer would probably be too much for it). 

The three of us and that man were rather crowded in the room--especially with the addition of our stuff, but whatever. We could manage. 

Then he asked for our passports--which yes, is common procedure when it comes to hostels but generally they take down our names and a few bits of ID. He took down every single detail on our passports. It was a very shady situation that made my anxiety tie my stomach into a giant mess of knots, that made all of us hesitant about handing over our passports. But during our moment of hesitation he continued insisting "If I don't get passport, it €700 fine." At the time we thought that was for US. (it is actually for the hostel owner, which makes more sense). 

Either way, we gave them over. Then it came time for payment. Now I urge you to look back up at the information I got from Hostelworld. Especially the part where it says "Payment upon arrival by cash, credit cards."   On the confirmation email I'd gotten after booking said so too. So I had been prepared to pay using my card. 

He said a couple things that deviated from my confirmation email. 1.) We could only pay in cash and 2) the price was no longer €299.70, but now it was €399.70.  Now I wasn't too keen on giving these people my card number (it went through Hostelworld the first time, which I was fine with) but I certainly didn't appreciate having the option removed completely. More than the fact that I didn't have enough cash for that at the moment, he'd also increased the price by €100 ,which was complete BS. 

So Maggie, Carmen, and I all conferred on our next move. One night. Could we survive one night here? Mayyybeeee? Let's try for that. €133.23 total. That would be fine until the others got there. 

Onto the next piece of business, we still didn't have the cash to cover all that just yet. We needed an ATM. We asked the guy, figuring he'd just give us crappy directions and we'd have to somewhat figure it out--like most people have done. But no. He told us to leave our stuff and he'd walk us to the ATM himself. (In hindsight he was probably trying to make sure we didn't just take off, which I guess makes sense). 

The ATM was about a block away and there were two inside a little room. Which my friends and I used to converse about what the hell our plan was. Did we really want to stay in a shady place that very much resembled a horror movie? I mean, we probably weren't gonna get murdered but judging from the grime covering about every inch of the place it was likely that we'd catch some sort of disease, if not only bed bugs and a bad coating of dust mites. I'm not a germaphobe or anything, dirt doesn't generally bother me that much, but this was really really bad. There is a certain level of clean that I think is necessary for healthy human living, and this was not it. 

After about ten minutes we decided we'd just go back, get our stuff, get our information back and get the hell out of there. We'd go back to the train station to wait on the others and figure out somewhere else to stay, even if it had to be a more expensive place--just somewhere that we could stay for the night at the very least. 

We waited until we got there to inform him of all this. We were a bit nervous that he'd lock us out and keep not only our bags but also our passport information (not really sure which is worse to be honest...). He was completely confused. 

He had no idea what we were saying. We tried simplifying our English at first, then when we realized that wasn't working my friend asked him what his first language was (it wasn't Italian)--hoping Google translate would help us to communicate our point; which was simply that we wanted our information back and then we wanted to leave. 

That was when he got angry. He nastily said he didn't have time for this, he had other people coming and we were wasting his time. He said a mixture of words we couldn't understand and was then very insistent on something to do with the police. We didn't know if he was going to call them on us, or what, but we wanted to leave.

Finally, he decided he would take us to see his manager. This manager spoke around the same amount of English as the previous man but was much easier to communicate with. After he realized what we wanted, he told us we would have to pay the cancellation fee and then we could get our information back. 

This was fine with us. It was €100 fee, paid in cash, then he handed us our passport information sheet and we got out of there. 

Once leaving the "hostel" we retraced our steps back to the ATM, as it was a well lit place with cameras and all. It seemed like the safest place for the moment. We took that time to contact the other two (who were actually on their plane at the time so "contacting them" meant sending them a group message saying "place fell through, get back to us as soon as we land"...well those words are a LOT calmer, but you get the point). But mostly getting ahold of our parents to try and get their help to find a new place. 

After about twenty minutes, we went back to the train station. It had a connected cafeteria-type place filled with all kinds of foods. We, of course, each got a margherita pizza and devoured them. We were all starving and completely stressed out. (It was amazing pizza by the way). 

Then not long later we realized this place was closing. The others had landed and were on a train to this station and we now had to find somewhere else to wait for them. "Why didn't you just go into the station?" you ask? Well, we couldn't for the life of us find a way into this station. We walked all up and down outside, constantly getting middle aged men coming up to us saying "taxi?" (which after the same person asks four times it gets really irritating)

After a good while of doing that we finally started messing with the location finder, of course that just was not working for us. When we actually did find our friends I was so beyond relieved. Two extra brains that weren't clouded with the WGH stress. 

We walked down the street to a 24-hour McDonald's (yes, When in Rome after midnight with no place to stay one must take up camp in a McDonald's. And that McDonald's was waaayyyyy cleaner than WGH.). 

After nearly 2 hours Maggie's mom managed to actually get us a place! 

Hotel Gerber. It was fairly central, or at least close to a tube station (and the Vatican). And what's better? I didn't feel like I was gonna get murdered when I walked even near it. We managed to scrounge up 2 Ubers to get there, too. 

We were split up into 2 rooms, three/two. And it was such a wonderful place. Seriously, if you ever go to Rome and need a hotel to stay in, I recommend that place. It's great. It was a lifesaver that night and I am so grateful. 

Anyway, that was my first night in Rome. I think it is very wise to check the reviews to any hostel on more than just Hostelworld, try tripadvisor, Google...everything. Just look on everything. And read the bad reviews, like all of them. They're more telling than the good reviews, in my opinion. 

Thanks for reading, if you've gotten this far. It was important for me to lay out all the details for you, because there is really no other way to tell this story. And honestly this is probably still a lot tamer than how it actually was. We were all so stressed out and I was honestly terrified. I've never been in a situation like that and I never want to be again. I still get nauseous just thinking about it. 

Have a good one, and I'll see you again soon!

Jazz

Also! If you wanna hear about all the good parts of my trip, go to my YouTube channel (link at the top of this post and in the sidebar) because that's where I'm posting my vlogs of Rome, Florence, Verona, and Venice.