The Anti-Shag Pact

Krakow was still asleep when I arrived. 

It was five-thirty in the morning. My hostel was somewhere off the main square, and I had to be at the meeting point for my tour to Auschwitz by six a.m. 

The city streets were seeped in grey as market stall flowers slept behind wooden shutters. Hoping to leave my luggage behind, I walked the perimeter of the square watching in frustration as the blue arrow on my Google Maps spun in circles. 

My phone, insisting I had already arrived as I turned down an alleyway, buzzed at the first door on my left. The intercom crackled. The door clicked open.

Inside, an old stairwell with peeling green paint and poor lighting coiled upwards. 

I hauled my suitcase up two flights before it became obvious that the building was not a hostel, but rather a strange sort of office building. I turned to leave, forgetting about one of the missing sections of the staircase. My foot slipped into the gap and I fell, my suitcase following after me as I tumbled out the door and back outside to the silent alleyway. My snapping ankle, the only reverberating sound.  

A woman walked past. She slowed, looking long enough to take in the scene: me on the ground, luggage scattered across the alley, my ankle already beginning to swell. She let out a sharp exhale, shook her head, and continued on her way.   

…  

After managing to limp to my tour's meeting point in time, I went on to spend the day in Auschwitz, grateful my luggage could stay on the bus. By the time we returned to Kraków my ankle had swollen to the size of one of my breasts.  

I spent the evening sending the hostel increasingly desperate emails asking where exactly they were. Eventually, they replied with a photograph. It showed a doorway on the main street, circled in red. Beneath the image was a short explanation: the hostel sign had recently fallen off.  

After finding the right door, I climbed another staircase. 

The first things I noticed in reception were the statues. They were explicit — yet less intimate and more graphic than the ones in Rome. Posted on the walls were photocopies and images of what appeared to be people’s nudes. 

I later learnt the concept was interactive: guests could either take a nude photograph, print it and add it to the wall, or sit directly on the photocopier and create one themselves. Many of the images were signed, some accompanied by social media handles. A record not only of who stayed, but who had been willing to leave evidence. 

By this point, my walk had deteriorated into something closer to a hobble. The receptionist greeted me with an enthusiasm that undoubtedly suggested the hostel would live up to its 9.6 Hostelworld rating based on sociality alone. 

“Welcome, welcome!” she said. “Before you check-in, please read the rules.” 

She pointed to a laminated sheet taped to the desk.  

The first rule read: Having sex in your own bed is allowed (preferably bottom bunk). 

The second rule read: If you wish to have sex in someone else’s bed, let them know. 

I had booked a six-bed mixed dormitory.  

The receptionist looked at me with unwavering enthusiasm. “Are you ready for tonight!?” 

I had just spent the day limping through one of the most historically catastrophic sites in Europe and did not feel particularly prepared nor interested in any sort of frantic night.  

She explained that the hostel hosted a nightly bar crawl, beginning in what she described as the “caged basement.” 

I nodded politely and climbed another flight of stairs to my allocated dorm, calling my friends back home attempting to explain, rather frantically, the situation I found myself in.  

… 

My roommates turned out to be just as bewildered by the rules of our hostel.  

Besides myself, an energetic Australian on her mandatory European tour, there were five other people in the room. Four of them were Brits: Kacie and James, a couple travelling through Europe, while Oscar and Harry were friends taking a gap year from university. The sixth bed belonged to another Australian, although the only time any of us saw him was when he appeared briefly to collect a pair of pants before disappearing again.  

We met the way most hostel roommates do: bags being shuffled around, beds politely negotiated and names exchanged alongside nationalities. When it came to my turn, I lifted my swollen foot and explained my encounter with the alleyway three doors down.   

Kacie went to fetch me an icepack and some tape from the reception, only to come back carrying a rubber glove filled with ice.  

“They don’t have a first aid kit,” she explained. “So they gave me this.”  

Kacie and James were interested in joining in on everyone's plans, suggesting we “ditch the bar crawl downstairs” and find a good place to eat. 

Reserved at first, Harry would only speak when spoken to, whereas Oscar was immediately on board, recommending a few pubs he’d spotted around the corner.  

It took only a few minutes before I mentioned the laminated sheet of rules and the collection of erotic images in reception. A brief silence followed.  

Then Kacie laughed. She’d admitted she’d been equally unsettled when she had arrived, briefly convinced she had accidentally booked herself into a predominantly male hostel.  James said he’d read the rules twice, hoping they’d somehow improve on second glance. Oscar and Harry, having already survived one night, confirmed that the rules were entirely serious.  

The conversation drifted, as conversations sometimes do, to the logistical difficulties of sharing a six-bed dormitory where sex could in fact occur in your bed without your knowledge.  

It took remarkably little discussion for us to agree that none of us would be participating in that aspect of the hostel's culture.  

Thus, the anti-shag pact was formed. 

… 

We spent that night in an Irish pub, singing alongside an Icelandic choir, touring Poland for the summer. Crowded around a sticky pub table, we drank and sang our way through Angel Eyes then It’s Raining Men. At one point someone called for Murder on the Dancefloor, which the choir, trained voices and all, delivered with such professionality it made some of us mess up in the pursuit of trying to keep up. 

On our final night together, we committed fully to the hostel’s bar crawl and its “caged basement”, an underground club decorated with metal dance cages and lit with the kind of green and purple lighting that makes everyone look more hydrated than they actually are.  

There were drinking games around long wooden tables, trays of sugary shots handed out before we had even reached the basement. Every so often a guest would slip behind reception to sit on the photocopier and Harry and I would try our best not to break into laughter as another nude joined the growing wall of scanned anatomy.

The crawl itself moved with the efficiency of a small community's climate migration. Four different clubs, each preceded by a shot from the hostel staff before entry and the promise of discounted drinks inside. 

By the time we reached the final venue we were, collectively, quite drunk. Myself especially. Kacie and James had settled into the comfortable rhythm of a couple on the dance floor and were grinding against each other quite enthusiastically. Oscar had wandered off in pursuit of what he described as “a hot, tall Polish man.” Harry and I occupied the empty space near the centre of the club, dancing with the loose, slightly uncoordinated enthusiasm of drunk tourists.  Harry, it should be noted, had a girlfriend at the time. This fact had not seemed particularly consequential up until that point, given that our interactions consisted of dancing and shouting over the music. Strictly interested in one another’s friendship.  

All was anticlimactic until Oscar reappeared. He was operating under a level of intoxication that influenced him to pull me aside and inform me that I was “too pretty to be dancing with someone in a relationship,” as it might, “send off bad ideas.”  

This statement, delivered with an authority he had not previously displayed, caused a reaction in me that was both immediate and disproportionate to the nature of his remark. I excused myself immediately, running into a neighboring apartment complex, where I sat myself against a wall halfway up the building's staircase and cried with the intensity that tends to occur when one has consumed too much alcohol. 

Kacie and Harry discovered me slumped against the wall, attempting to explain - through tears  - that I was “not that kind of person,” and that I would never want Harry’s girlfriend to feel the way my mother had once felt in her marriage.  

Kacie, impressively calm for someone who had spent the evening drinking, told me to ignore the comment, that I would look fine within an hour and could return to the dance floor whenever I felt ready. Harry took a seat beside me, apologising repeatedly for his friend, reiterating that we both knew nothing inappropriate had or would happen. Oscar hadn’t meant any harm. He’d simply been trying to look out for Harry. More than a year later, I learnt the original comment had actually come from James, prompting Oscar’s well-meaning intervention.  

Once the tears had subsided Harry suggested we get some food, so at two-thirty in the morning we b-lined to the only thing left open in Krakow.  

McDonald’s, I realised, functions in most European cities during the summer as a kind of neutral ground for emotional resetting. People arrive looking as though they have either fallen in love with a complete stranger or experienced great difficulty making it through the automatic doors. I looked as though I had just been dumped, which made poor Harry appear, to outside observers, as the culprit. With mascara streaking down my face, puffy eyes and a Rudolph red nose, several people looked first at me and then at him with an evident stink eye. The two of us sat outside the main square, only a few hours before sunrise, talking about things I no longer remember. My clearest recollection from that moment is sitting cross legged on the concrete ingesting a medium-sized fries and a sprite. 

As I sobered up we decided we may as well go on a walk to watch the sunrise, walking past the hostel and towards the long river that runs through the city, around the corner from Kraków’s famous castle. Harry sat on a bench while I sat on the grass beside it. It was the quietest part of the city, despite being basically the centre of town. A warm morning breeze and a small curly-haired dog introduced themselves before a Polish man followed behind. He asked where we were from and what brought us to the river at four in the morning on a Wednesday. 

His question solidified something I hadn't expected to realise when I limped through the city the previous Monday morning, searching for a hostel whose sign had fallen off. In reality, I had stumbled into something far more lasting than two nights in a Polish dormitory. I had found what is now one of my most genuine friendships. One that still feels close, despite the sea and the thousands of kilometres between us.