After chatting with a few travelers at the hostel tonight, I thought it might be helpful to relay some of our thoughts on staying at hostels vs. hotels vs. bed and breakfasts since we’ve recently been asked by a few people which we think is better.  The short answer is there is no one or the other we would pick – it really depends on the place itself.  Hostels generally have more of a social atmosphere and a younger clientele, but we’ve stayed at a lot of hostels that have people in their 30s and 40s staying there.  The nice thing about hostels is they usually have a fully equipped kitchen so you can cook a meal if you want, the bad thing is that it’s almost always shared bathrooms, which can be gross.  B&Bs can really be hit or miss, but we’ve been happy with the two we’ve stayed at so far.  Like I said before, though, at a B&B, you’re in someone’s home so you tend to feel like you have to stay quiet and out of the way.  Hotels in Europe have been fairly good so far, but at a hotel you’ll never meet anybody or get advice about where to go or what to see (unless you’re at a small owner-run hotel like the one we stayed at in Avignon).  The plus side of a hotel is the noise insulation (you don’t get woken up as other people come and go) and the privacy, especially having your own bathroom.  It’s also nice to have someone clean your room everyday, although we generally turn the housekeeping staff away because they come so early! 

For comparison sake, here’s a list of our accommodations so far:
1. Lisbon, Portugal – Rossio Hostel; loved everything except the showers
2. Porto, Portugal – Rivoli Cinema Hostel; great but no social atmosphere
3. Madrid, Spain – Barbieri Internation Hostel; worst place we’ve stayed so far
4. Barcleona, Spain – Itaca Hostel; great private double room that felt like a hotel
5. Montpellier, France – Les Arbousiers B&B (Jean-Luc & Ann d’Auzac); fantastic hospitality & a big spacious room, option for home cooked meal for dinner
6. Nimes, France – Campanile Nimes Centre; not close to anything but ok budget hotel
7. Avignon, France – Hotel Boquier; nice owner-run small hotel
8. Nice, France – Ibis Nice Centre; first stay at this budget hotel chain, no frills but very clean & fairly new
9. Lyon, France – Ibis Lyon Centre Perrache; bigger room & cheaper than Nice
10. Geneva, Switzerland – City Hostel Geneva; dorm-style hostel so no social atmosphere,  private twin room w/nice bunk beds, Wi-Fi broken
11. Bern, Switzerland – Bern Backpackers Hotel Glocke; great except for check-in policy sucked and there weren’t enough bathrooms
12. Lucerne, Switzerland – NH Lucerne Hotel; a step-up from Ibis, bigger & more luxurious room but not worth regular price
13. Strasbourg, France – Hotel Le Grillon; 2nd worst place we’ve stayed, very dirty, felt like I was in an attic, shared bathrooms
14. Rouen, France – Ibis Rouen Centre; standard small Ibis room but not close to city center!
15. Le Mont-Saint-Michel – Hotel Formule Verte; very basic budget hotel but ok
16. Caen, France – Bristol Hotel; cramped over-priced budget hotel, bad Wi-Fi
17. Paris, France – Ibis Paris Gare de L’est; typical Ibis but a bit older
18. Munich, Germany – Ibis Muenchen City; typical Ibis, bathroom a bit small
19. Berlin, Germany – Best Western Hotel City Ost; not in city center but commute was no problem, a bit better than Ibis, bathroom was nicer
20. Hamburg, Germany – Ibis Hamburg Alster Centrum; again typical Ibis
21. Dusseldorf, Germany – Ibis Dusseldorf Zentrum; not close enough to center
22. Cologne, Germany – Station Hostel for Backpackers; room was nice, bathroom was gross, didn’t socialize with anyone at the hostel
23. Luxembourg – Novotel Luxembourg Kirchberg; much nicer than Ibis but not worth regular price
24. Brussels, Belgium – lucdelux B&B; small basic room but comfortable
25. Brugge, Belgium – Lybeer Travellers’ Hostel; 3rd worst place we’ve stayed but good social atmosphere & really good Wi-Fi

Today we’re onto Luxembourg City, the capital of Luxembourg, a small country in between Germany, France, and Belgium.  Unfortunately, we’re only stopping here for one night because all the hotels are quite expensive and there weren’t any suitable options for budget accommodations. Although I would have preferred a bit more time to explore Luxembourg, we managed to see a lot of the city and we got to be a spectator at the ING Europe Marathon, which was quite the event!

We ended up booking at the four-star Hotel Novotel Luxembourg Kirchberg, which is part of the Accor hotel group that own the Ibis hotels, because they had an early booking rate of €79/night (prepayment required). The room is huge (with a king sized bed, an extra sofa-bed, and a large desk) and all the furnishings and linens are definitely a step up from the Ibis hotels, but I don’t think it’s worth the €250/night regular rack rate they charge. The nice thing about being in a four star hotel, though, is having a mini-fridge in the room! I haven’t seen a mini fridge in our hotel room in ages…

The first thing I did after checking in was jump in the shower since I hadn’t showered during our two nights at the hostel in Köln (the showers were just too gross there!). After getting cleaned up, we headed out to the starting area of the marathon to see the start of the race which, unlike most marathons we know of, began at 6 pm. We picked up free hats (decorated with the ING lion, see pic) and whistles and joined a huge crowd of spectators for the biggest race start I have ever been to – there were so many people everywhere you couldn’t see the end of the line!

When most of the runners had headed off, we hopped on one of the free shuttles running throughout the city (we had taken one earlier to get to the hotel) and went back to town center to get some dinner. We wandered around the historic town center and decided to try some ribs and beef stroganoff on a street called Place de Paris where there were a number of restaurants. By the time we sat down the runners in the lead were coming by, and we were amused to see that, as with most marthons we’ve seen, a guy from Kenya was at the front of the group. Why is it that there’s always a Kenyan in the lead at marathons and races? After dinner (which was really good but a bit expensive), we wandered around all of old town, following parts of the marathon route and veering off at other parts to look at buildings, cathedrals, and shops. There were spectators and bands all over the place and the atmosphere was quite lively everywhere we went. I think there was something like 8000 participants in total so the whole event was huge and there was media coverage all over the place.

As we crossed the bridge back to our hotel at 11 pm, I watched the runners at the back of the pack push themselves to get to the finish line (which was still about another 3km away) and I felt inspired to get back into the running training I had done last year, before we came up with the idea to travel. I’ve always wanted to be able to run a marathon but I’ve never made the time (or effort) to go through the training necessary. Last year I trained for an event called Seek the Peak, which was 17km uphill, but as soon as the even was done with, I got lazy again and stopped running. The funny thing about travelling is you have all this free time to be inspired to do all this different stuff, but when you get home, the reality is you can’t do all the things you want to do! So far I’ve wanted to learn to speak fluent French, start my own coffee shop, build a model railroad, and run a marathon. I wonder which, if any, of these I will actually accomplish when we finally do go home…