AdFreak points out this awesome advertisement for HostelWorld, playing off of the movie Hostel, which you might remember is a film primarily celebrating every adult’s most primal fantasy: to chainsaw torture to death those On The Road spouting smelly beatniks who pompously preach about the “purity” of traveling with only ten dollars in their pocket, a single pair of underpants in their rucksack and a twenty pound bag of rice slung over their shoulder.

I’ve been staying in hostels when I travel since I was 18. In fact, I’m in a hostel in Budapest right now. However, as a 27 year old, it’s interesting to be viewed upon by the same pretentious jokers I once worshipped and emulated as the out-of-it fogey. It’s odd how ideals change: between the ages of 18 and 23, I backpacked through about 40 countries, from South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, often with some dog-eared volume of Kerouac under my arm and usually on less than thirty dollars a day. It’s doable and it was fun at the time, but the bottom line is that once you actually can travel with money and can afford to go out for beers or on adventures with people you meet, you never want to go back to being a penny-pinching backpacker ever again.

For the record, while I’ve never been tortured at a hostel, I have had drunk cross dressers crawl into my bed in the middle of the night and try to snuggle. I’ve also been in hostels where the filthy bathrooms were illuminated only by black light, giving a nightmarish and hallucinogenic quality to the algae and cockroaches scurrying up the walls. Probably close enough to torture, but I still love them.

Travel site spoofs ‘Hostel’ movie posters [AdFreak]

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