I arrived in Dublin, having taken a plane from the US, and got in a taxi. I had one suitcase worth of belongings because I knew I’d be moving a lot and I was trying to pack as light as possible.
I went to a hostel and I remember it being €6/night. But thinking back now, could it really have been that cheap? It was the cheapest place that I could find, I remember that much, but €6/night? Well, maybe. It was a total dump.
It was a bunch of guys in a room and the room had a bunch of bunkbeds. I think that there were communal showers but there was some problem with them. No hot water, probably. The place was shit.
I don’t actually remember much about it. I was only there briefly, maybe two or three days, and then I said, “I have to spend a little more to get a better place.” So I went to a different hostel. It was also shit. Then I went to another one. The one I decided to stay at for the majority of my stay was maybe €10/night. I don’t remember. I only had like €2000 with me so I had to budget accordingly.
I really liked Dublin, though. I’d go for walks and just think, “I can’t believe that I’m here.” And I forgot about that student loan instantly. When I was in the US, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Once I left, all of those worries went away.
So I was looking for work. I would go to a big Subway that had an internet cafe in it. Actually, maybe it was a big internet cafe that had a Subway in it. You’d pay 50 cents for one hour of internet. So I’d go to the job sites, send my resume out, and that was that.
I got loads of interviews. Almost every day, I’d go on an interview. I didn’t like taking the bus because I never knew what stop to get off on. You can ask the driver when you get on and he’ll announce the stop when he gets to it but I didn’t like doing that. So I just walked everywhere. Plus, I was trying to spend as little money as possible.
So I’d walk sometimes hours to these job interviews. And there was no Google Maps in those days. I just had a physical map of Dublin that I used. It wasn’t like a huge fold-out map. It came in a book form. But still, it seems crazy to me that I was able to use it. And a lot of the names of the streets weren’t indicated anywhere. There weren’t any street signs. So it’s difficult but I don’t ever remember getting too lost.
I had an interview at a place looking for a security guard. Great. I have previous experience doing that. No. I’m too quiet and won’t fit in. This was a common complaint. Basically everywhere I went would give me that same exact feedback. Verbatim. It’s shocking that they would even say this. I guess that being quiet isn’t a protected status but still. It’s preposterous. Are you looking for a friend or are you looking for somebody to do the fucking job?
I never experienced this in the US. Not once. And I was just as withdrawn. It was never a problem. It was never a problem getting the job and it was never a problem with “fitting in”. I suspect that the difference is cultural. American employers are looking for people who can do the job. It’s a crazy idea but that’s how it is. But in Ireland (and in England, as I would come to learn) they’re looking for somebody who’s fun to have around the workplace. Somebody who will go drinking with them after work.
I had another interview for a job where you set up for business events. Well, I did this sort of work before too. I set up for parties at a casino. You set up tables and chairs and whatnot.
So I get there, after walking for two hours, using this atlas to guide me, and the guy asks me why I should get the job. I say, “Well, I basically did the same job before.” He interrupts. Really pissed off. “No. You were setting up for parties. This is for business events.”
Oh. Are the chairs different? Are the tables different? What exactly is the issue?
The guy was just an asshole. He was like 30 years old and doing this shit job. Twenty years later, he’s probably still doing that job. So he was precious about it.
I decided that maybe I should look for a place to live and then find a job. Because I hated living in this hostel.
So I responded to an ad. They were looking for a housemate. There were like six people living in some shitty apartment. But it was cheap. I was looking at the cheapest possible places.
I get there, after walking however many hours, at night. It’s on the outskirts of the city. And the guy meets me outside of the property. He was an Irish guy. That’s perhaps unusual. In my experience, at least from London, it’s always foreigners living in these dumps.
He was a friendly guy, around my age, and he says, “So what are you doing for work?” I explain that I just recently moved here and I’m looking for work. Oh. He calls over some woman who lives there. Introduces me to her and says, “He’s looking for work.” Her face drops. No. You need a job.
They didn’t even show me the property. There was no point. So there goes that idea.
I suppose that I could have lied when presented with this situation in the future. But I thought, “No. How long can it possibly take to find a job? I’m just having bad luck.”
So I went back to the hostel. I stayed there a lot because I didn’t have a job or any money. And people were there traveling. There was an American couple who got pissed off because I spent so much time in the room. They wanted to have sex in this fucking eight-person-per-room hostel.
So I mentioned the problem to reception and they put me into a room with a bunch of guys who were basically living in the hostel. They were all looking for work. So same thing as I was doing.
There was a fat English guy, an Italian guy, a Lithuanian guy, a couple of Polish guys, and a couple of other Americans. The English guy might have been starting a job recently. I’m not sure. And the Polish guys and maybe the Lithuanian guys were selling newspapers on the streets for like €30/day.
So one day, one of the Polish guys asks if I want to sell the newspapers. I say sure. He gives me a phone number. His boss is a gypsy. I call the number and I hear a bunch of dogs barking in the background. But the guy says, yeah, just come tomorrow and you can start selling the newspapers.
I don’t remember what happened. I couldn’t find the place or something.
I wonder what those newspapers were. I don’t think that it was a homeless thing. There’s a newspaper that homeless people sell in the UK and Ireland but I don’t think that it was that. I think that it was selling mainstream newspapers to people in their cars. That’s what I remember being told by these Polish guys.
The next day, this Italian guy asks me how the newspaper vending went. I told him that I couldn’t find the place. So he goes off on a rant about how all I’m doing is sitting in the room all day. I should be out looking for work, et cetera. I was doing this. Every day, I would send more resumes out. Every day, I would go to an interview. There’s not a whole lot more that I can do.
I also went door to door handing out physical resumes. But the time for doing that was long gone. It had been YEARS since anybody did that. Everything was done online now. I’d give my resume and the person would just look confused. I didn’t get a single response from any of these physical resumes that I was handing out.
So I just said fuck it. I’m sick of this.
Next day, I went to the internet cafe and booked a one-way flight to London. Somebody in the hostel asked what I was doing the following day and I said that I’m going to London. The Italian guy overheard this and looked surprised. Probably felt bad about what he said.
He was the catalyst for me moving but I was sick of everything. The shit hostel, walking everywhere, not being able to find a job, not being able to find an apartment. Nothing was going well.
I’ll give the name of this hostel, since it’s no longer operating as a hostel. Four Courts Hostel. From what I can piece together, it become a homeless shelter some time in 2020. The reviews of this place from at least 2019 to 2020 often mention people living in the property so this would seem to check out. They were presumably housing homeless people as a side gig and then decided to go all in.
You can’t book a room in this hostel any more, so, again, it seems like it became a homeless shelter. It’s also listed on Google’s little summary as a “homeless shelter.”
I didn’t really have any problems with the place, though. Some of the staff were assholes but I didn’t see anything too shady there.
I suppose that it’s a fine line between backpacker hostel and homeless shelter. As I said, even twenty years ago, people were basically living there. At €10/day, that’s like €300/month. You could definitely get a room in a shared apartment for less than that, maybe €200/month was the low end, but it’s difficult to get a place when you don’t have a job.
With covid, I have to assume that a lot of hotels and hostels became homeless shelters. People weren’t travelling.
Isaac’s Hostel was the first place I stayed in. That’s a place that I would expect to be a homeless shelter now. Total dump.
Oh, it is a homeless shelter. I’m not able to book a room but there are recent Google reviews, unlike with Four Courts. Maybe these are homeless people reviewing the place.
Their website still lists the room prices, though. It’s €13/night now.