Since we arrived here a little under two weeks ago, we’ve been living at a backpackers’ hostel while looking for a permanent place to live.

We had a meticulous method for choosing the hostel: a couple of months before departure, Bree and I Googled “Toronto hostels” and stumbled across the site for the Canadiana Backpackers Inn.

We saw “free pancake breakfast”. We saw “free wi-fi”. We booked.

The next time we got together, we had a rare frank moment and said hey, we only booked because we saw free pancakes and free wi-fi… we should look around. We did, and it seemed like the best thing going. Plus, we were already booked, so… meh.

We arrived at 11pm on a Tuesday, about 30-odd hours after leaving Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport. Imagine how tired we were. Go on, give it a shot. Yeah… tired. So we got to the hostel and quietly reported to the front desk, and they then showed us to our room.

I’m sorry, did I say room? I meant cupboard. Showed us to our cupboard.

Reasons Bree is awesome #1: she needed the toilet shortly after putting down our bags. I could hear her laughing hysterically in the loo. She came back and reported delirium had set in with jet lag and the tiny size of this room was hysterical.

It’s true, I told her: I had pictured our bunk beds in one corner, and a wide enough girth left to, oh I don’t know, unzip our bags and have them act as living cupboards for the couple of weeks. We barely had enough room to even stand our bags up. Even then, they had to be relocated to open the door.

The next day, we approached reception to ask if there was some kind of shelving solution they could offer, because we packed our lives into our suitcases and need ready access to them. (Apparently, we are courteous to a fault.) After a brief discussion, they figured out the subtext was “we’re not happy with the cupboard”, and moved us to another room – which was much bigger.

How both rooms are the same price, when one room has a desk and two set of drawers and the other has… floor and air, is a mystery to me. But this room is much, much better.

I’m perhaps a little too comfortable in this room, as the other day I was playing music through my iPhone speakers (thanks for the going away present, friends!) – at what I’d consider a moderate volume, but that is obviously subjective – when I heard a very loud rapping on the door. So I answered it.

“Hey guys!”, a hostel worker beamed.

“Oh, it’s just me,” I replied.

“Oh, really? Because I figured there MUST BE A PARTY GOING ON.”

In stripper fantasies, this is the part when the chick walks into the room and makes a helicopter with her bra. But, no. She was just being a total bitch while telling me to turn down my music. Fair enough to tell me to turn it down, but she was carrying the angst of a million noise complaints before me, forgetting that this is my first “offence” and she hasn’t told me to turn it down umpteen times before. Her loud knocking was clearly audible over the music, but her diatribe went on for a good five minutes; banging on about how there are students in the building. All I needed to hear was, “Can you turn it down?”

That night, at 11:30pm or so, we were sleeping. Or, trying to. Some backpacker chicks from some foreign country decided against this however, and were – at a guess – playing horse race in the corridor, making gallivanting noises on the way back to their rooms. Where was bitch face then, huh?

Their inadvertent mission to ensure I didn’t feel comfortable in the room carried on the next day. I’d just returned from my shower and was still in my towel while checking something on my laptop. The door opened and a random dude came in.

Need to reiterate here: there was no “loud” music playing, and there was no knocking. Just me, in a towel. On my laptop. Luckily this was momentarily before I whipped it all out to put my undies on. “Sorry!” the Mexican cheerfully said, as he emptied my bin and carried on his day.

As for the free pancakes and wi-fi: the wi-fi is the bomb. Bree and I use it almost constantly. But the Canadiana’s wi-fi is a bit shit, so my laptop always picks up a wi-fi signal called ‘dlink’, which is an unsecured network that is better than their one and mustn’t be very far away.

The pancakes are served at 9am promptly, so Bree is never here to get them (she leaves for work around 8am). I’ve been a couple of times, and the point they fail to mention is that you will be forced to eat with backpackers. At a backpackers’ inn! I KNOW, RIGHT? Oh, and the pancakes are kind of… sub par.

For those not paying full attention, here’s the recap:

- we booked at a place called Backpackers’ Inn, yet have a thing against backpackers.

- we booked for the free wi-fi, yet use a neighbour’s unsecured network.

- we booked for the free pancakes for breakfast, yet only one of us eats them (and they’re rubbish).

We can’t wait to move out on Tuesday.