My favorite question to ask hostel staff is “What’s the strangest experience you’ve had working here?”
I’ve heard disgusting stories, like in Vienna, when someone on the top bunk vomited onto a sleeping traveler on the bottom bunk. (Actually, that’s surprisingly common.) And I’ve heard beautiful stories, like how a hostel worker from big city Los Angeles fell in love with the small town of Cesky Krumlov.
But as for the strangest story I’ve heard- my hostel in Olomouc takes the cake. I know that yesterday I already wrote about the Cosy Corner Hostel (sorry). But this story was just too weird not to tell.
Kevin, one of the staff workers, told the tale:
“So it was a few years ago, we’re sitting in the common room and there’s a girl in the bathroom putting on her makeup. She thought something smelled weird. She opened up the bathroom drawer and inside was a little shoebox with a dead fish.”
“We all went, How? Why? What? We were thinking, Did we have any guests pissed off or so? A few days earlier, there were these young Australian backpackers and we thought it might be them.”
“There’s a student bar here in town. We went there a few months after we found the dead fish, towards the end of the summer. They have a big aquarium at the bar and there was a fish swimming inside. We looked at the aquarium and thought to each other ‘At the beginning of the summer, weren’t there 2 fish in there?’ ”
“So they must have gotten drunk in the bar and decided to steal a fish. Which is already an amazing feat, if you’ve ever tried to catch a fish out of an aquarium. But I still don’t know, where in the middle of the night, you’d find a shoebox.”
Hostel workers have seen it all. Even dead fish. What’s your weirdest experience from staying in a hostel? Leave a reply!
Until next time- Saludos!
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