The Grandio
You see
advertisements in every city you go: Party hostel! Don’t plan on sleeping! Free
shots for guests! Different pub-crawl every night! So on and so forth. Every
city you backpack in has at least one. Amongst all the different party hostels
in Budapest one stood miles above the rest, or it did on TripAdvisor. According
to their website inebriation lasted all day. Maybe see the city, maybe stay in
and drink. Go caving! Take a beer bike! Drink “strawpedoes” or knock back a
couple jaeger bombs! I found it a little unnerving, but equally exciting to
stay in the greatest party hostel of them all: The Grandio Party Hostel.
The first
thing we noticed when we walked in early that morning: the cult of personality
writ large. A two-story apartment-complex-turned-hostel wrapped around a gravel
courtyard dotted by several witch hazel trees. Glass tables filled the
courtyard covered with all manner of half-empty shot glasses, beer mugs, and
solo cups. Mismatched red and white chairs lounged chaotically throughout the
space. Power lines snaked overhead from
all corners of the building. Several gifts hung amongst the corded spider web:
a ruined keyboard, a broken ukulele, women’s underwear (of multiple sizes and
varieties.) We were in the right place.
A British
expat named Pixie signed us in. We sat there across from what can best be
described as a twenty-first century British Jack Sparrow. Pixie handed four
full beers to us, wobbling a bit to sit down. We sipped the cold beer at ten in
the morning while Pixie laid out the rules:
1.
You
must wear the wristband to get into the hostel at night so don’t lose that and
bring your hookup buddy during the day.
2.
The
bar is open at all hours. No tabs. Get weird with it.
3.
Parties
happen every night. They require a small registration fee, the rest is up to
the hostel. Trust him, go with the flow.
4.
Check
out is at eleven o’clock in the morning.
The first thing we did after signing
in: take a shot. For free. We waited so long (several months) after booking our
reservations we could taste satisfaction in the bottom of our glasses. Here we
were, in the flesh. The website promised ‘the best parties in Budapest’ and
already The Grandio lived up to it’s standards. The thin, bearded Brit showed
us to our rooms.
Keenan and I shared a bunk bed in a
room marked by the perfectly graffitied Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Donatello
on the second floor. Garrett, and Matt shared a room in the Michelangelo
dorm. To get to their room we had to pass by the two-story garden hose beer
bong taped to the railing. Dillon slept on the first floor. Tin sheeting covered us overhead and letters spray
painted into the wall spelled out Grandio, with all manner of comments sharpied
into the white lettering. There is no courtesy breakfast, tiny bathrooms, and
would we like to go on the jaeger train tonight? Don’t ask what it is.
Everyone’s going. It’ll be fun.
We
reconvened, mouths still agape at the laidback vibe. Dillon, it turned out,
neglected purchasing our train tickets to Split. Garrett, furious at this
revelation, volunteered to go to the train station himself and get the tickets
himself. Keenan and Matt joined him leaving Dillon and me to wash clothes. Dump
clothes in washing machine, add detergent, close door, push ‘start’, then wait.
Simple.
Dillon and I
sat there at a table in the courtyard, drinking a morning beer. Something
light. The woman tending bar notoriously never smiled and never talked. Pixie
stayed in the office to check in newcomers. A second worker, a shorter stockier
man with a mop of hair, introduced himself as Avril. Apparently everyone goes
by his or her nicknames here. Dillon and I chat with the slow-witted, stocky Scotsman.
Before we can learn the source of his nickname we catch a group of people filling
red solo cups with cheap Hungarian ‘sör.’
Dillon and I
approached the ping-pong-table-turned-drinking-platform, our duty long
neglected. It may be ten in the morning, but that meant the games had started
late for the day. Yes, we were invited to join, encouraged even. We had yet to
prove our American mettle. Even as we divided into teams and forced cheap light
beer down our throats I could tell this hostel was special.
It wasn’t
just the bras that hung in the air or the incredible egg, bacon, and cheese
breakfast sandwich you could get from the kitchen. The hostel made a business
out of dingy fun. Bar crawls every night. Karaoke parties. Boat parties. Roman
Bath parties (those were the most infamous ones.) The painted murals started
conversations: Wonder Woman or Cat Woman? You can rest when you’re pissed. In
each dorm rested one condom dispenser with a list of ten different
alliterations to describe the ‘Pregnancy Prevention Tool.’ The cracked concrete
walls acted as notepads for the artistically inclined giving the whole hostel
the impression of a much bigger, much nicer well-graffitied bathroom.
Our first
night there we celebrated the retirement of the manager. A man eerily
reminiscent of Tito from Rocket Power burrowed out of the manager’s room and
drunkenly greeted all of us. In turn he knocked over the shot glass that
knocked over the remaining fifty shot glasses of jaeger into their respective glasses
of red bull. Jaeger Train.
We only
stayed there two full days but those two days easily could’ve stretched into
seven or eight. During the day Dillon and I went spelunking in a cave system
outside of the city (an hour by bus.) Frodo, our guide, helped us navigate into
holes we never imagined any amount of contortion would get us through. At the
Roman baths everyone from toddlers to teenagers to geriatrics take a swim in
the blue waters. One tiled-floor bath offers hot water and the other offers
cold water with an Olympic sized workout pool in between.
The Grandio,
as it turns out, not only attracts tourists from all over, but also merits regulars.
I sat down at a table, hungover, one morning next to a young backpacker. Messy
hair, clothes a-tangle, and the light fog of an early morning bender crossed
her eyes. She explained to me she’s visited the hostel four summers in a row
now. She was due a job. In fact, Pixie lived at the hostel for several months
before he started.
“Oi! Avril!”
The Girl spotted Avril slinking away from one of the dorm rooms. He froze, and
then smiled as he walked over to join us.
“Avril,
how’d you get started?” I asked. The Girl drunk-giggled.
“Well, I was
hanging around the hostel one day. Some folks invited me to play beer pong. I
just kept playing. Then, after a few hours the hostel owner asked me if I’d
like a job. So I said yes.”
Well said.
The Girl chuckled. She gauged his lack of shirt or shorts and smiled widely.
“You’ve been
with my sister last night.” She shrieked excitedly.
Avril smiled
sheepishly before putting a finger to his lips. Quiet hours were in the morning
until noon.
“You have! I
can smell her on you!”
Avril
shrugged.
“Good on
you! You bastard!”
I, for my
part, stood up very slowly. Grabbed my glass of water. I stepped quickly away
from the conversation before any other slightly disturbing sentences could be
uttered from the drunk girl in the corner.
The hostel intimidated me with it’s
Devil-may-care attitude. Nothing could be more Laissez-faire than a bartendress
who doesn’t talk or a British expat named Pixie. The Grandio hostel may be a
party hostel to some, but it’s a whole lot more to the rest of us. It’s a true
vacation. It’s summer camp. It’s a place you can go to be someone else. It
offers all the trappings of bacchanalian life, but erases the deep worry of
your daily life. It’s intoxicating. So much so that I had to forcefully convince Dillon to move on to the next city. It sinks it’s teeth in
playfully, but deep.
Budapest offers much for the casual
tourist. Ancient Roman Baths, Communist dictator statues, Hungarian goulash,
vast cavern systems, and bars with fish tanks full of disco balls. Yet, despite
all it’s charms the Grandio remains in my head. Like when you close your eyes
after staring at a bright image the Grandio burned itself into my eyelids,
seared into memory. Which is ironic considering we drank a lot at the hostel. Or not. Drinking there, after all, is a way of life.
