The hostel kitchen is an anarchic place, often the heart to the hostel. It’s a place for socialising, drinking, playing cards, oh yeah and cooking.

This guide to the hostel kitchen should give a little insight to the hostel virgin, and will probably bring a few smiles to the already initiated.

The rules.

Every hostel has a system to attempt to keep the chaos at a manageable level. As you can imagine, washing up is a major issue. Anyone that has experienced shared housing such as student halls of residence or even a flat share will know the politics of washing up. There are nearly always posters informing people that they must wash up immediately after their meal. Other more direct approaches include issuing each resident with their own crockery and cutlery and taking a deposit on each item. This ensures that everybody keeps hold of their own items and ensures that they are not only kept clean but also stored away safely. The downside to this policy is that you have to watch your items like a hawk in case somebody nabs your mug because they have lost theirs. This approach still doesn’t stop people leaving the pots and pans in a state – under the usual excuse of “letting them soak”. Face it people, we are all adults, now it's about time we can just wash up our things and be done with it.

The hostel fridge is also another contentious point. People are constantly coming and going in hostels, how do you keep track of the food in the fridge? I know I have difficulty doing this with my own fridge at home. You can imagine how easy it is for a forgotten box of eggs to turn into a festering, rancid “surprise” for some poor backpacker. The usual method for maintaining control on this is for people to be told to mark their name and check out date on each item in the fridge. This rule is enforced by the cleaners – if it isn’t marked, it’s going in the trash. Some hostels have gone to the steps of banning milk stored in cartons and favouring bottles with screw tops. This is because the fridges often get very full and it’s common for an open carton to tip over and spill over the rest of the fridge.

Similar rules apply to the other food storage areas. The cleaners have to be quite ruthless to ensure the health and safety of the hostel is not compromised. It may seem pedantic at times, but it's much more preferable to a bad case of food poisoning I can assure you!

Beware!

On the whole, backpackers are a very honest bunch. I see people leaving their CD players, mobile phones and even wallets in plain view on their beds – with a very low chance of something going missing. In the kitchen however, things are not quite the same. Key items such as milk and bread seem to be treated as fair game for theft. I believe this is mainly just because people think that just taking a little milk for their tea or just a slice for their toast won't hurt. A few times over and suddenly you find you have none of your milk or bread left! This is very irritating when you have woken up, hungover and are in need of tea and toast to recover!! The food thief is the lowest regarded backpacker of all. So let this be a warning to you, if you are caught you will probably be hung!

People

There are definitely several stereotypes that occupy the kitchen:

1. The Culinary Genius. These people annoyingly seem to have it all sussed out. Just as you are marvelling at your own ability to boil water, these people are casually serving up a mouth-watering dish. It makes you even more hungry and your pasta dish suddenly seems inedible. How they manage it with the limited facilities is baffling. Form a mental note to make friends with these people and make sure you’re invited to dinner tomorrow!

2. The Two-minute-noodler. Time as they say is money, and so is food. Why waste good time and money on a meal when it could be spent down the bar! To these people food is just something to keep the hunger pangs away. These two minute noodles cost nearly nothing and require the cooking ability of a chimp. Unfortunately, they taste like something you scraped off the floor.

3. Carb-Captains. A more developed form of the ‘two-minute-noodler’. This group encompasses the majority of backpackers. Pasta travels and keeps well, and it’s cheap. The rest is up to you, add a few veggies or just some sauce and “voila!”, a meal is yours. It’s a common site to see rows of travellers sitting down chowing down to huge piles of the stuff.

4. The Socialite. These people are only in the kitchen for social reasons. Somehow, be it a healthy bank or a bulging credit card – they always eat out and never cook. They will sit and sip a beer with the rest of the gang, make some snide remark about washing up – then bugger off to get a kebab.

If you have any advice for surviving the hostel kitchen be sure to add them in the forum CLICK HERE