Day 14: The Nord Hostel

I made reservations for us to stay in the Nord Hostel in St. Petersburg, based on the great experience I had there in 2011.  The previous year, I stayed in the dorm rooms which are located a very short walk from Palace Square and the Winter Palace.  The Nord Hostel has a very different feel from the Napoleon Hostel in Moscow.  The Napoleon seemed to be more of a “party” spot where the main lobby usually had college-aged people of varying degrees of sobriety (though in all fairness, the sleeping areas in the Napoleon are quiet and calm).  The Nord Hostel seemed to have more mature guests and friendlier service.  Take that with a grain of salt, for as with all hostels the atmosphere depends a lot on the people who are staying there at the same time.

For this trip to St. Petersburg, the dorm rooms were already booked so we opted for two private rooms located in another building (actually an apartment) about a ten minute walk from Palace Square (roughly the same distance the Napoleon was from Red Square).  The hostel offers transfers from the train station, but being the intrepid travelers we are, we just decided to follow the directions and enjoy an initial walk through the city. 

A former palace we passed en route to the Nord Hostel.	“To my left, your right, is the Gostiny Dvor, one of the world’s first shopping malls, built in the 18th century…”

Since the private rooms are located in an apartment, we needed to contact the Hostel manager, Lena (pronounced Lyena – Лена) which is where my Russian SIM card came in handy.  She came out to link up with us on the street corner, showed us inside and gave us the keys needed to access the numerous security gates between the street and our actual rooms.  Like many European buildings, it doesn’t look too special from the outside, and the staircase itself looks a bit run down.  However, once you get inside the apartment building it is a modern, clean, and pleasant place to stay.  Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the interior of the hostel, but they do have plenty on their website (www.nordhostel.com).

The staircase leading up to the Nord Hostel private rooms.	View from my room to the courtyard.

Lena keeps the kitchen stocked with basic breakfast items (yogurt, cereal, orange juice, milk, etc.) and the guests are free to use the kitchen ware to cook their own food as well.  We had several other residents there though we didn’t see them too much (most noticeable were two French women who, not to stereotype, were acting stereotypically French, and two Kazakh college students who we met near the end of our stay).  I also found a rather unusual book on the communal book shelf…

 
Обьектно-ориентированное программирование в С++ (Object-Oriented Programming in C++) – it’s interesting seeing the code in English, the comments in Cyrilic Russian, and some of the variables in Romanized Russian.

All in all, it was a great stay at the Nord Hostel and I highly recommend it to anyone staying in St. Petersburg that’s willing to forego the usual luxuries that accompany actual hotels.  Obviously, the private rooms were a bit more expensive than the dorms (it costs about $110/room/night, with a bunk bed and a single bed in each room.  The hostel rate is similar to in Moscow, around $30/person/night).