The YHA Hostel in Cardiff is nice. The steel bunk beds with the plastic mattresses are a whole lot more comfortable than they look. I have a four-bed room to myself because it’s the off-season. I’ll be here for two days, till my dorm at Cardiff opens.
The YHA lobby is clean and welcoming. It has a cheap coffeeshop, cafe and bar. There are more desk clerks than guests here at this time of year.
I dragged my suitcase to my first-floor room and spent five minutes fumbling around by my phone flashlight before I swallowed my pride and went back to the front desk to ask the nice night clerk how to make the light switch work. Turns out you have to insert and leave your room card in this slot in the wall in order to keep the lights on. I suppose the premise is that you can’t possibly forget to turn off the lights when you leave, since they’ll turn off anyway when you extract your card. The flaw in this plan is that if you are the sort of person who forgets to turn lights off when you leave, you are probably the same sort of person who leaves your room key in the slot and gets yourself locked out. Twice. In one night.
By 7:35 at night, I hit a mysterious second wind. Apparently jet lag, just like drunkenness, goes through stages, and I’d pushed past exhausted-tired and irate-tired into caffeinated-squirrel tired. I went back to the lobby (ROOM KEY!) and bought a 50p tuna sandwich. If I get food poisoning, I’ll know it was worth every penny.
A youth hostel tip: bring your own shampoo, soap, and if you can possibly fit it into your luggage, towel. Towels cost extra.
After the sandwich, I was thirsty, so I excavated my coffee thermos from my suitcase. Thanks to my mom’s mad dense-packing skills (referred to in our family as Kinnucanizing, for her mother, the all-time champion dense-packer Mitzi Kinnucan, who could probably have fit a grand piano into a carry-on), my thermos was full of socks. I took them out and filled it with tap water. I was halfway through it, thinking it tasted kind of socky, before it occurred to me that I should have rinsed it first. At this point, I realized exactly how jet-lagged I still was, and went to bed.