How to survive indoors adventures

by Marina Kolesarić (Croatia)

I didn't expect to find Portugal

If you ever traveled to Portugal then you’re probably already familiar with its beauties. I thought I would meet these beauties and the adventurous life of its cities, but I didn’t expect to find the real adventure indoors. Have you ever done a road trip, by bus, in the middle of the Summer, for more than 24 hours? Guess what, I did. At first, it wasn’t that bad, but after a long day of driving, I fell asleep dreaming of my perfect road trip when suddenly something hit me hard and woke me up in the middle of the night. Was it a car crash? Did we hit something? Why did we stop? A lot of questions went through our minds. Silence turned into a whisper as fear was growing bigger by the second. Then suddenly, someone stood up to see what’s going on. Funny, it was only a tire, actually two of them. The tragedy of it all was that we only had one spare tire so we needed to call car service. It took them 2,5 hours and tensions were getting bigger because we wanted to watch the World Cup Championship. That was the first time in the history that Croatia fought for the gold medal, so we didn’t want to miss the grand finale. We finally came to Lisbon around 6 pm, left our luggage in the hostel without checking in and went straight to the main square to support our players. Dressed in our national uniforms, everyone recognized where do we come from and greeted us with joy. After a long night of celebrating, we finally came to our hostel ready to go to bed. After checking in, we went to our... shed - it literally was that. The receptionist told us that they had to renovate the hostel so they, unfortunately, don’t have enough room. That’s why the four of us needed to stick in a small room, with tiny beds, “a window” with a view on the kitchen (yes, you read well) and with a smell of a fresh varnished deck. There was no room key, which is totally logical since there was no lock. However, I decided to go to sleep - tomorrow was a big day. The moment I thought about that, I heard knocking. Four panicked girls stood there telling us that they have bugs in their room. Long story short - and then there were eight... Early in the morning, we had to deal with the locksmith because we didn’t have locks. We thought everything is settled, but after a beautiful day in Lisbon and a little sunburn we came back to our room, but couldn’t get in. It was Sunday night and locksmith wasn’t working, so it was our turn to beg people to take us in their rooms. Eventually, we went to the kitchen, hang out with a couple from the other room and then it hit us - we can get to our room through a kitchen window... On Monday, after the hottest day of Summer spent in one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to, Porto, we got back to our lovely little “penthouse” ready to dress up and enjoy the Lisbon nightlife along with the couple from the other room we’ve met yesterday. We came back to the hostel and the atmosphere was heat baked - literally. There was no water so we couldn’t take a shower, wash our hands and the worst - flush the toilet. I guess you can get the picture by yourself. Although we’ve planned to stay longer in Lisbon, we’ve booked a flight home and told the receptionist to say goodby to that couple from the room 23, but he told us there’s no couple nor room 23… Not in my wildest dreams did I expect that on my trip I will have so many adventures and challenges in my hostel and not in the outdoors. I can’t even describe how happy I was coming home to my own room, bed, and...water. Maybe I didn't learn how to survive in the wilds, but I sure did learn how to survive in wild conditions. Little things really do make people happier.