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When Ronny called me, I was lying in a hostel bed in Camden with a fever. Two weeks before, I had dropped out of university to move to London. Two weeks later, I was unemployed, sick, and lonely. “Who is this?” I asked, not bothering with niceties. “Ronny K.,” a deep voice answered with an Aussie twang. The name sounded as if it belonged to a cartoon character. “We’re looking for a receptionist at our hostel in Marylebone.” Two days later, I made my way to the hostel through the snow sludge. It was the year that holes in your jeans were fashionable and my knees were red from the cold. I hadn’t been to Marylebone before, with its rows of identical townhouses. Under the looming grey sky, I felt like my London adventure was nothing but depressing. The hostel itself was located down a side street, with a big board outside that said ‘AWARD-WINNING BACKPACKER HOSTEL’. It looked like that might have been true ten years ago. Outside the front door, the pavement was covered in cigarette butts and the wooden picnic benches had started to rot from the London rain. Further down the street, a homeless man was dragging his mattress to the underpass nearby. I paused on the front step, took a deep breath, and went in. Inside, the walls were painted black and the couches looked like someone had found them next to a dumpster and carried them here. The bar was smack in the middle of the room, with ‘RECEPTION’ written in chalk on the side. A man with a bushy ginger beard appeared, wearing a neon singlet and bright pink shorts. “You Erika?” he asked, and I nodded. He pointed at the pink-haired girl behind reception and said: “This is Lisa. She’ll show you what to do.” The rest of my morning was spent doing the dishes and helping people who didn’t know about the invention of Google Maps. “People are stupid,” Lisa kept repeating. One of the guests came up to the bar and started chatting to us. “I’m Alex,” he introduced himself. “I used to work here seven years ago and now I’m staying here for a while.” His blonde hair was combed back like a schoolboy’s and in his checked shirt, he looked like the kind of man a mum would want her daughter to date. “By a while, he means six months,” Lisa laughed. “Has it been six months already?” he shook his head. “Yeah, don’t get stuck in the hostel trap,” he said to me. I laughed it off, thinking this place was too dilapidated to stick around. I’d be out of there as soon as I could. That was before I even knew about the black mould, the bed bugs, the mice. It was when I still believed that the ‘24-hour hot water’ statement on the website was true. Instead, what followed were the most intense months of my life. There was love, laughter, and all-nighters. There was a ruthless early morning shift on 1 January. There was living and fighting with coworkers and learning Aussie slang. There was homesickness and never-ending colds. When I first arrived, I thought I’d stay for two months. I ended up staying for almost two years. “Why are these flags here?” a guest asked me a year after I’d started. The new manager had covered the couch we were sitting on with sheets because it had become so off-putting, no one wanted to sit there anymore. The guest was pointing at the Chile flag on the ceiling. “To cover the stains from the leaking shower,” I replied. I saw the guest’s face distort in disgust. “Why do you live here?” he asked. “I got stuck in the hostel trap,” I replied.