Surviving Our Stay at Dublin’s Isaacs Hostel

My travel mate Chelsea and I survived our first night ever in a hostel. But I’m not entirely sure how.

Isaacs Hostel is considered one of the best in Dublin. We chose the cheapest room which was an eight bed, co-ed room.

The room smelled absolutely awful. There were four giant football equipment bags and it smelled exactly like my brother’s hockey pads when he used to leave them around the house in high school. Great, we were staying with four football players and who knows who the other two people are in the room.

Note that there were no lockers in the room. But Isaacs does have lockers in the basement available for 2 Euros a day.

Isaacs has a decent size lobby with lots of chairs and long tables. The wifi was best in the lobby, even though our room was just off of it.

During our entire stay the hostel lobby was filled with giant football players. I mean, giant. Like Penn State looking football players. And lucky us, four of them were staying in our room.

The first thought that went through my mind was, “Great, the room is really going to stink once they get in there.”

So after walking around Dublin most of the day, we walked into the room eager to take a nap and what do we find? A football player passed out in Chelsea’s bed. We ran into the hall screaming like little girls. We can’t do this. Sorry Europe, I’m sure you’re great but we’re out.

What did we really do? Splurged at a bar.

Isaac’s is part of a 12 Euro Backpackers bar crawl. Several Dublin hostels get together to do a bar crawl through the city. It leaves from the Mercantile Bar every night at 8 p.m. It’s really fun and a great way to meet other travelers!

On the bar crawl, Dublin started to look up as local bands belted out Irish music and we got more and more beers in us. We met tons of other travelers on our pub crawl and really started to think, “OK, maybe we can do this.”

We cautiously walked into our room and found three of the football boys laying in their beds with “Chelsea’s bed” now free (don’t worry, she didn’t stay in it. The guy just had the wrong bed so she got his clean, unused one). The smell had somehow subsided and they were the nicest college students from Kentucky!

Next thing we knew Chelsea and I were sharing Semester at Sea stories and the football players were promising to help us if the creepy German man staying in our room got weird in the middle of the night. Also, their coach told them they were going to be in their own room so they were just as creeped out as we were. Not sure they expected to have girls in their room!

The next morning we apologized to the football players for thinking they were going to kill us and they invited us to come out to the bars with them after their game. From killers to friends! Aren’t hostels great?

So surprisingly, we survived our very first hostel experience. The smell in the room after the football game was TERRIBLE and Chelsea almost vomited. But hey, at least they didn’t kill us, right?