In almost any other dimension in which I exist, this sprawling blog post would likely start with me saying that I am an extremely unhappy man right at this moment. But as it happens I’m actually not. I’m chilling on a chaise longue, watching Roma hilariously dismantle Barcelona in the Champions League on a giant flatscreen TV and eating some suspiciously tasty Hungarian sausage that I just cooked. Life is good.
But for a (fairly) brief and chaotic moment last night it turned into a nightmarish Bruegel painting of angry hostel managers, painful insect bites and maybe the strangest phonecall I’ve ever been a participant of.
When we first booked this trip a few months ago, we resigned ourselves to staying at 11th Cinema Hour Hostel in the Astoria district of Budapest, booking it through the HostelWorld website. Cheap and cheerful but with great reviews and in a decent location, we felt like it would be hard to go wrong here; I’ve stayed at many a hostel on my travels and – bar the time my bed collapsed in Nagasaki – most of them have been relatively incident-free.
When push came to shove, however, 11th Hour, the great hope, was a great shithole.
You could tell from the moment you regrettably waltzed through its oversized doors; cavernous, cold hallways, rude staff and a bizarre 8-bed dorm room masquerading as the “private double en-suite” bedroom they had sold us, this was a dingy, empty and grimy hostel. It was the exact thing you didn’t want to see when trying in vain to convince your partner that hostels are a great way of seeing the world. We checked in, dumped our bags, triple-locked our door and headed out into the city to spend as much time away from the room as we could.
The first night – we thought – went without a hitch. Despite the blazing heat from the radiators that were inexplicably on full blast all night, the sleep was pretty comfortable.
And then…
Bedbugs. Bed bugs. Bugs of the bed.
After a second day of hiding in a point on the map of Budapest as far from our hostel as we could physically reach, we headed back home after a night of drinking and boom: while getting changed Kate noticed a row of three bites on her hip. Having learned – ironically in Budapest three years earlier – that three bites in a row was some sort of cruel joke only played by scheming bedbugs, we immediately freaked out and darted out of bed, both of us no doubt resisting the urge to leap into the others’ arms like Shaggy and Scooby at the sight of a vampire.
“What do we do?!” was my immediate response, to which Kate replied, after we had decided that bleach-boiling our skin or passing out were not viable solutions, that we should stay calm, move all our clothing off the beds and onto the floor, and go get someone from reception.
While I was putting my shoes on I heard a faint but purposeful “oh there it is” from behind me, and I swivelled to see Kate forlornly pointing at full arms-length toward a shrivelled black insect resting on the sheets in much the way a family from Basildon might point at a vandalised council-funded fence in a local newspaper. We took some close-up photos of the creepy little intruder to both present to HostelWorld and to undoubtedly reminisce while fondly looking over with our distressed grandchildren, before I left the room and headed down the corridor to the reception.
Nothing. A pitch black room with nobody in it. Sure, it was midnight by this point, but come on. There should be some way of contacting a staff member, right? There was no way I was heading back to that bloody bed. But nope; the nothingness continued despite me waiting around. Nobody came for 15 minutes. With hope sinking I shouted into the staff room, I waved at the CCTV as if there would be someone watching every move I make remotely, and then gave up and called the main phone number of the hostel listed online.
After a brief connecting tone, a small 2005-era flip-phone in the bookcase in front of me lit up and started vibrating. I silently watched as it shuffled its way across the shelf, teetered on the precipice for a moment, and bravely plunged its way onto the stone-tiled floor behind the counter, leaving me standing in a dark room listening to the voicemail message of a phone I had just witnessed kill itself.
Then I saw it: the overnight number pinned to the wall in scrawled handwriting. I thought it would be my ticket out of this surreal waking nightmare, but was sorely let down when I phoned it and it rang out the first three times.
Fourth time, however, someone on the other end rejected the call before the voicemail came. Aha! Someone’s there! You can run but you can’t hide.
Fifth time they rejected the call even earlier.
Sixth time it went back to ringing out again, so I gave up and began composing a tedious email to them while Kate and I started making solemn, tear-soaked preparations to sleep on the floor and/or in the bathtub.
Suddenly, in the dark, my phone rang. It was the same number. No longer would I be left wondering what might have been. I grabbed it, pressed the “accept call” button and heard a croaky, sleep-deprived female voice say “… hello?”
Puffing my chest out with an unearned victorious pride, I described with great gusto the current predicament within which my girlfriend and I had found ourselves, after which was a painful, lingering silence before she sighed, composed herself and shouted something along the lines of: “… I don’t really give a f*** what is happen with the bugs, you are f*** idiot and I have baby here at house and it is night and [swearing in Hungarian] bedbug [swearing in Hungarian] emergency [swearing in Hungarian] f***ing hold on moment.”
[sic]
Then I heard a click. Then the line went dead.
Having overheard the rather surprising conversation as it pierced the glum silence of our disgusting room, I spun round to see Kate standing in awe, jaw on the floor and hands frozen mid-sock-fold. But before we could even begin to stammer ourselves back into coherence, my phone again buzzed in my hand. I looked down, my mouth still agape. It was the same number. I picked up and said “… hello?!”
This time it was a softly-spoken Hungarian man. “Hello? Hello there. Hello Mr Gabriel. Hello I hope everything OK,” he said with an extremely unsubtle, almost pulsating guilt punctuating his words.
“Hello,” I responded harshly. “What the hell happened there?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?!
“It is nothing.”
“Why on Earth did that woman just speak to me like that?”
“Oh it is nothing,” he again insisted with an almost bizarrely passive tone, as if trying to persuade me that I had somehow imagined being sworn at by an aggy mum.
After a lengthy chat about the bedbugs he promised he’d drop by so we made ourselves comfortable for the hefty hour and a half it took him to get to our hostel. Sleep deprived and riddled with insect bites, we insisted he move us to another room, which he did, before we sent him on his way while reminding him we would be seeking a full refund. We then woke up the following morning to find that our new room had also been infested. Ten new bites. We took more photos and left immediately.
Long story short, we salvaged our stay here. We booked a quite amazing aparthotel at the last minute for £30 while waiting for HostelWorld to fully investigate what they call a “case file” on our incident at 11th Hour to determine whether or not what the manager called a “rigorous poisoning scheme” on the bugs had in fact wasted everyone’s time by doing f*** all.
We’re off to Zagreb on a lengthy train tomorrow so, although my writing feels a little rusty, I hope I can use that time to fill you in on the stuff we did in Budapest that didn’t involve taking close-up shots of bloodsucking insects and engaging a hypnagogic Hungarian man in an unexpectedly abstract debate over whether being sworn at by his raging wife counts as “nothing” or not.
But right now it’s pretty late and the word count on this post is getting out of control. Well done to those of you who have made it this far.
Also, never stay at 11th Hour Cinema Hostel.
Gabe
Hidden Gabe 