Paper House

“That fart smell steam, the hamster cage of wood chips.”  A quote from the movie Fight Club, describing the scent of the house Jack/Tyler Durden were living in. It’s not too different from my reaction when I first stepped into the Globetrotter Hostel on Avenue du Mont Royal, on the East side of Montreal.

Surrounded by independent boutiques and lots of trendy restaurants, this neighborhood is filled with bicyclists going to and fro around buildings of older European architecture. But the building that the hostel occupies is the definition of an extremely, outdated roach motel. I was led upstairs, on a severely steep and seemingly unstable set of squeaky stairs, to the secondary level of available rooms and dormitory beds. The dirty room had splotches of old paint on all the walls, which were painted various random colors. The wall separating my room from the adjacent room is a thin piece of plywood, which moved when I accidentally nudged against it. Lighting is a lamp, without its shade, with a single bulb, sitting on top of a makeshift nightstand of the plastic box variety. Every step I took, the room responded with an eerie and mysteriously loud creek. A fan is provided as compensation for the lack of A/C, which I turned on the entire night, being that it’s 80-85 degrees all day and night. And finally, one single bathroom is shared by 12-15 guests, depending on how crowded the hostel is for that particular night. Far and away, it’s the most humble of all my accommodations throughout this entire trip. On the upside, it’s only for one more night and then I bid farewell to Canada.