After spending three days in a hostel at the beginning of my trip, I was ready to find my dorm. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with hostels. On the contrary, I was overwhelmingly impressed by our Germany accommodations (the Wombat Hostel), which were attractive and offered a charming student lounge area, an affordable breakfast for guests, and even a bar, which was a great place to meet other young travelers without going outside in the cold.
However, while your average hostel traveler might come with a bag or backpack, I had just gotten off the plane and as traveling with four months worth of clothing. I would consider my packing to be on the light side, but I still had a suitcase to store and maneuver. The room I shared with seven other Salzburg College students at the Wombat was not prepared for the amount of stuff that got crammed into it, and, though my time in Germany as nice, I was ready to get out and see my permanent accommodations.
Salzburg College relies heavily on homestays, where you live with a family and they cook for you every day. I am really not about that life, so I decided to forgo the usual and move with five other students to a dorm facility where I could have more freedom and privacy.
It was the best decision I could have made. I really could not have asked for a better home base for my adventures.
The Salzburg Leherhaus, where I’m currently scribing from, is a dorm that doesn’t affiliate with one particular college. The first floor is for boarding high school students, but everyone else here is a college student. I love it here. The building is attractive, quiet, and clean. In fact, it’s super clean, because there are employees that clean my bedroom and bathroom every week, which is possibly the best thing about this trip. I cannot say enough good things about not having to clean the toilet.
Living here makes it easy to get close to other Salzburg College students, since six of us live here in adjacent room, but it also gives us the opportunity to meet Austrian students as well. Since Salzburg College is just made up of Americans studying abroad, I’m surrounded by a lot of people from home for most the day. It’s nice to have friends around with lots of shared life experiences, but since I came to Austria to experience Austrian culture, I appreciate getting to interact with local students here at the Leherhaus.
I share a modest double room, but after living in Boston’s congestion for three years, any room larger than a shoe closet feels huge to me. Many of my meals are provided by the dorm cooks, and there’s a kitchen down the hall for the meals we have to handle ourselves. There are even refrigerators full of little individual locked cubbies so each room has a private place to store food.
The best part of the Leherhaus (other than the fact that someone else cleans my bathroom, obviously) is the view. While the jagged mountains that are so iconic to the region aren’t often visible from the heart of the city, they’re on full display out near the dorm, which is about twenty minutes on foot from downtown. Every time I look out my window here, it’s like a living a scene from the “Sound of Music”!
