Staying at the Bell Tower Youth Hostel was the very first, and hopefully last, hostel I’ve ever had to stay in. I would have liked to say ‘had the pleasure’ of staying in, but it doesn’t deserve it.
The rooms were ok…ish. I wouldn’t step into the shower without any slippers on. To be fair, I wouldn’t even enter the bathroom without any slippers on. Outside the room was worse. Dirty, loud, smelly, with grafitti on the walls.
The plus side was that the hostel was situated next to the Bell Tower, a primary landmark right in the centre of the city. And though the City of Xian is very beautiful at night with lights decorating its buildings, street performers, and kites flying in the sky, the most exciting thing about this city during the daytime was the shopping centre that had an entire floor the size of my neighbourhood block. Which was pretty boring if you weren’t shopping or eating.
The strangest thing was that all my electronics went haywire in protest while I was staying in the Hostel. My camera started vibrating angrily whenever I wanted to take a photo, my netbook couldn’t find or connect to the wireless internet that everyone else in the hostel was able to connect to (even though it picked up on every other connection that was within the vaccinity, but not available to me), and my phone became possessed.
Sharon in Dutch accent – ‘last night at around 3am I woke up to the sound of your phone beeping. Beep beep beep, it just kept on going! I thought you were txting, and after a while I had enough and rolled over to tell you to keep it down but you were sound alseep. So I picked up your phone to switch it off and it was filling the screen with the number ‘9’s… Strange. If it had been the number ‘6’ I would have freaked out!’
That was the first night. The second night I pulled the phone apart and slept with the lights on.
Tiara in Transit 