This past weekend was a holiday weekend: Constitution and Feast of the Immaculate Conception (gotta love living in a Catholic country and getting more days off than you would in the U.S.). My friends and I decided to go to Valencia, about a 4 hour bus ride southeast of Madrid.

I liked Valencia as soon as I arrived. The winding streets, the colorful buildings, and the art around every corner is so unique to the city, and unlike anything I’ve seen in Spain so far.

When we got to the hostel we were staying at, I was informed that, instead of staying in the same room as my friends, I had been moved to a four bedroom mixed room. And, if I wanted to switch rooms, I would have to ask the girl who was in my room to move. I was angry, but what could I do? I wasn’t exactly paying for 5-star accommodations.

Unfortunately, the girl who was staying with my friends was unwilling to switch rooms. Why? I have no idea. My only explanation is that she was French; you may do what you will with that information.

For our first lunch in Valencia we had paella, a no brainer given that this is where paella originally comes from, and for our first night, we went on a street art tour. This was a great opportunity to see a lot of art, and a good deal of the city, that we might not have gotten to see otherwise.

I returned to my room around midnight. I knew now that there were two other women staying here, and one older man; the man was asleep. I fell asleep at 1, but was woken up two hours later to the sound of one of the women packing her suitcase; she had an early flight. Again, you get what you pay for. I fell back asleep, but woke up again at 5, this time because the hostel was blasting the heat in the room and I could barely breathe. I got out of bed and my bunkmate, who was awake, whispered to me to open the window. As I did so, the man who was sleeping closest to the window, rolled over and said, in broken English, “Don’t open the window, go downstairs and tell them to turn off the heat because we can’t.” I said “Ok”, and began to take steps towards going downstairs.

Before I got the chance to even put on my slippers and grab my key card, the man jumps out of his bunk bed, swearing and talking to himself in Spanish, slams the window shut, and storms out the door. I look at my bunkmate and she looks at me and says, in her thick Swedish accent “He’s crazy”. Two minutes later the heat turns off. As I sit back on my bed, the door opens and the man comes back into the room, flicking the lights on. He begins yelling at the other woman, telling her off for being so loud in the middle of the night and that “This isn’t your country so you need to be more respectful”. She starts yelling back at him, saying that she wasn’t the one making all the noise and that she’s going to call the police.

And then there’s me, sitting on my bed, wondering if there was some way I could run out of the room and sleep in the hallway, and thinking about how maybe my mother’s warnings about staying in hostels wasn’t illegitimate paranoia.

Eventually, the shouting stopped, and I spent the next four hours tossing and turning. All day Saturday I thought “I just need to get through this day and then I’m back in Madrid, in my own bed, where no one is yelling at me at 5:00 in the morning.” But, despite being sleep deprived, the day was filled with activities; a tour of the Old City, the Science Museum, and more paella. The night was filled with *lots* of wine (I had just gone through a traumatic experience, ok?!), card games, yelling at a pizza delivery service for being two hours late, and much needed laughter.

Sunday was much better. Even though I got about the same amount of sleep as the night before, this time it was my own fault for staying up until 3am, and not because a strange man was yelling at me. My friends and I crammed as many touristy activities as we could in a two hour period, before I caught the 2:00 bus back to Madrid.

My 48 hours in Valencia was a series of chaotic, weird, experiences, that could’ve completely turned me off from ever wanting to go back. But the city itself was so charming, and the paella so delicious, that I feel sure I’ll be visiting again in the spring. But maybe this time, I’ll stay somewhere else.