Ryan Goes Abroad: My Room

As I said yesterday many people have been eager to see what kind of room I'm living in. I am in an eight bed dorm room at a hostel in downtown Auckland. My room is basically four double bunks with a walking path down the centre and a mini fridge at one end. Under the bunks are boxes where you can lock your stuff up. House keeping comes in every morning around 11ish and changes the beds of the people who left. So far in lieu of an alarm clock I have been using house keeping to wake me up in the morning. The beds have pretty skimpy pillows so I've been using my fleece jacket underneath the pillow to bulk it up. The really cool aspect of sleeping in an eight bedroom dorm (especially for as long as I have) is that you get to meet a ton of people from all over the world. So far I've roomed with people from Germany, Sweden, Canada, United States, Australia, South Korea, Malaysia Ireland and England. The dorm experience for me so far has been great. I really enjoy it. I've adapted to sharing a room with 8 people much better than I thought I would. The only downside to the eight bed dorm compared to the four bed dorm is it has less of a family feel to it. When I was in the four person dorm the four of us staying there seemed to bond better. We'd go out and do stuff together and just generally were more tightly knit than I find people are in the eight bed room.

Each floor in the building has a set of three guys showers and three girls showers. It also has two male washrooms and two female washrooms. So far I have yet to have to wait for a shower to free-up so it's not as bad as it sounds. The showers are push button meaning you push the button, get about 10-30 seconds of water and then have to push it again. This was a bit of a hurdle at first but it doesn't bother me anymore.

The hostel also has pretty decent cooking facilities with 24 burners (12 gas 12 electric), 8 sinks, 3 microwaves, some industrial toaster over thing, 3 refrigerators (two of which have been broken since I arrived. They also have a boiling water dispenser which is great for making instant soup (which I lived off of while I was sick) which provides easy access to instant boiling water. They also provide lots of cooking and eating utensils (there never seems to be spatula's though) as well as pots, pans, plates and bowls etc. There is also a "free food" shelf were people leave stuff they dont want to bring with them when they leave. I'm probably going to start tapping into this soon as it will provide a good way to keep costs down. There also seems to be a decent selection if you get there at the right time.

Cost wise I am paying $26NZD per night or approximately $18.81CAD per night. Which works out to around $570CAD a month. In addition to this I am paying about $108CAD a month for internet. Budget wise everything is working out great. I'm keeping my food costs down, not eating out very often. I'm eating a lot of fruit because most of it is pretty cheap. I've also lucked out and had roommates leave a lot of food behind (loaf of bread, bag of apples) so I am living as cheaply as possible food wise right now. I'm hoping I can build up enough energy to hit the grocery store again soon to get some pasta sauce so I can make some kind of pasta for dinner one night.

I think that about wraps this up for now. I will close out with some pics of my room and the lounge in the hostel.