Spring Break: The Cribs

If you've been reading the several-parts-long epic that has been my spring break blog post collection, you have probably picked up by now that my group and I stayed in some pretty ridiculous places on our little Eurotrip. (You've also by now probably become extremely annoyed with me for taking so unbelievably long to write four stupid blog posts about spring break, so thank you for your patience and for having a moderate enough fondness for me to continue taking interest in the things that I say.) Here, then, at long last, is the final installment of my spring break blog fest, and the one I have hyped up more than any other: Spring Break: The Cribs.

Let's start, logically, at the beginning of break. Technically, the accommodations our group experienced in Venice were split fifty-fifty between the place that I'll be writing about and a perfectly average hostel near the airport where the rest of the girls stayed for a night before I arrived. So not every moment of our crew's Venice living was improbably above average, but every moment of mine certainly was!

In Venezia, we stayed in a straight-up three star hotel. There are better hotels in the world than this one, but I sure as heck don't stay in them. When you're used to staying in hostels that fall in various places on the spectrum from "life-threateningly sketchy" to "right, but I'm still splitting bunk beds with a random kid from the Ukraine," staying in any hotel at all constitutes just about the ultimate in luxury living. This place was no exception. In the Hotel Gorizia a la Valigia, we had our own bathrooms (serving an average of 2.5 girls each), our own comfy beds, and free Wifi, free breakfast, and free hotel shampoo. Let me tell you, people of mostly America and Britain, you don't realize how much you love free hotel toiletries until you are re-introduced to them after months of staying in hostels and having a personal net worth that places you just above the poverty line. The same goes for free breakfast. Was my yogurt uncomfortably liquid-y? Maybe. And did the "pineapple juice" that accompanied my meal taste a little too much like the kind of thing that would come from a 20-gallon Gatorade pitcher at a Notre Dame house party? Sure. But, by God, this place was a legitimate hotel with real amenities and a real cleaning staff. Nothing bad can be said about this place. Nothing at all.

From the Gorizia, we moved on to Florence and our much sketchier-sounding second crib: the Alex House. I'll be honest: going into spring break, I was by far the most concerned about this accommodation. I hadn't paid much attention when it was being booked (read: 15 euros a night? say no more, I actually beg you), and I realized shortly before break that I wasn't even entirely sure what kind of place it was. Is it a hostel? Is it a bed and breakfast? Is it, in continuation of the trend begun back in Miami, an actual European guesthouse? I was unclear.

When, at last, we rolled up to the Alex House, my moderate fears were not soon allayed. On the night we arrived, Florence was a rainy, rainy city. We had carried all our earthly belongings for quite some distance, and when we arrived at our address, we found that Alex House was merely one doorbell of a series in a building completely inaccessible without being buzzed in. We rang the doorbell, then, standing in the downpour and praying someone would answer.

No one did.

We check our confirmation email, searching desperately for a phone number or a note about check-in times. We find a phone number and call it. It goes to what we can only assume from the Italian message is automatic voicemail. We find check-in time info and discover that the standard check-in window closed about two hours prior. We begin to panic. In desperation and exhaustion, we lean into the doorbell once more.

The door unlocks.

We rush inside and up the stairs to the reception level of the Alex House. The apparent proprietor checks us in, giving us maps of the city and assuring us we could pay whenever we wanted, as we hadn't enough cash upon arrival to pay at that moment. Just as my fears are starting to evaporate, our proprietor crushes them with the news that our room is "up a few more stairs." We follow the woman up three more flights and through two more doors into our room, and we discover that our fears were entirely misdirected.

Our "room" is an entire, beautiful apartment. We had two set-apart bedrooms. We had two couches that folded out into shockingly comfortable double beds. We had a full kitchen and a washing machine. We had a TV. We had a bathroom and two, count 'em two, heated towel racks. We had our second writing desk of SB2K13. We had our own furnished terrace. We had a chandelier. For 16 hours a day, if one sat in the right place on our stairs, we had free Wifi.

Is it what most people would call luxury? Probably not. But did we cry a little when we saw it? I mean...perhaps.

What all people would rationally call luxury, however, was the apartment we moved on to when we headed to Paris. The story of our last accommodation starts, as in Florence, with a driving rain and a significant period of worry for all of our lives. As the emails from our booking company had instructed us, we got off the Metro stop near our apartment rental and walked to the place where we could pick up our set of keys. To our delight, we found it exactly where it should have been - under the doormat of someone whose identity remains, to this day, a complete mystery. We walked the remaining blocks (in the rain, once again) to our own building and let ourselves in. We walked up the few stairs to our door and tried to unlock it.

In this endeavor, we failed. A lot.

We tried the door again and again, passing the duty off between all six of us several times before calling the emergency contact number we had been given by our rental company. In the second instance of an unsettling trend, their foreign-language voicemail greeted us with the news that they would not be answering the phone tonight. From the apartment Wifi we could just pick up from outside the door, we covered all our bases and sent our company contacts several emails. Just as we were starting to weigh the option of using the semi-stolen Wifi to look up a locksmith or a new place to stay, we try the door one last time.

Success.

The door opens onto what must be one of the most beautiful little appartements in all of Paris. It has all the elements of the Alex House apartment, but all of them are clean. Our new chandelier is made entirely of glass, as are all of the doors blocking off the living room. The place is covered in vases full of flowers, weird but trendy-looking statues, and a general air of our group being cooler than every other spring break group both this semester and ever. As I mentioned in my last post, we spent our final night in Paris sitting in our apartment watching Passport to Paris. When you have an apartment this insane and a selection of baguettes, brie, macarons, and vins from the patisserie and grocery store outside the Musee du Rodin, what exactly would you do with your final night in the city?

The places we stayed in on this trip were, in every sense of the word, insane. I've written about this comment before and I'll write about it again now: on this spring break, we only went uphill from the three-star hotel. And you know what the best part about all of this is? For the entire length of spring break, our total accommodation cost per person (excepting the first night in Venice, as not all of us had arrived yet) was $255. $255 per person for nine nights in starred hotels and luxury apartments in Venice and Florence, Italy, and Paris Effing France. My hat is perpetually tipped to the organizing ladies of this trip for finding these absolutely incredible places, and my hat is tipped to all the people I've talked to since break for tolerating my unstoppable need to brag about them.

Life is good, my friends. Life is pretty good.