Canadian Days: Friends at the Hostel

One of the most enjoyable aspects of staying at a hostel is meeting people you wouldn't normally meet. During my entire stay in Canada I stayed in a hostel and I made friends from around the world. I was even apart of a group of friends that hung out all the time--and almost all of us belonged to a different nationality. But one lamenting thing about hostels is the friendships you make in them tend to be short lived. This is for two reasons: 1. Most people only stay a couple of nights in hostels. 2. Once you go back to your native country you tend to be seperated by a vast distance from the people you befriended, which makes keeping up with them difficult. Since most people stay in hostels for a short period the friends I had was constantly shifting and changing. When one person would leave a new arrival would take their place.

One of the first people I befriended was a guy named Johnny, who was from Manchester, England. One night Johnny talked me into dancing on the dance floor at a club, which is a remarkable achievement, and anyone who knows me will understand what I mean. By nature I am a shy person, and I've always dreaded dancing in front of people. I feared--and I still fear--that my dancing skills would make a fool of me. People were egging me on to dance, and I expressed concern that I would look like a fool because of my mediocre dancing skills. "If you can dance real good then you probably have too much time on your hands," Johnny told me. That got me out on the dance floor. But Johnny took off to ski in Vancouver a couple of days later, and I never saw him again. A couple of weeks later I met a girl from Scotland in the hostel. She smiled at me and said "Hello. I'm from Scotland. My name's Jennifer. People call me Jen." This was the first thing that happened to me that day, and it was as if she was telling me she was going apart of the group of friends I had, and she eventually was. But unfortunately--like all people who stay at hostels--it came my turn to leave. This was not an easy to do. Right after I learned a hold was put on my credit card my friends approached me on a street corner smiling at me; they were glad to see me. But I had to break the hard news--more than likely I would be going home because I couldn't use my credit card. I could tell they wanted me to stay, but under the circumstances I thought the best thing to do was to go home since I had no job, little cash, no credit card and because three months of my six month work visa had passed. It was awkward, and I wish I could have stayed. When I left one thing that did run across my mind was who I wouldn't befriend because I was leaving.