Word: hostel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Outside class, students led a grim existence. Gorbachev spent the first three of his student years in the shabby Stromynka student hostel, an 18th century former barracks that housed 10,000 young people packed eight or more to a room. There was a kitchen and a washroom on each floor, but no proper bathing facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates would head to a public bathhouse twice a month. They stored their personal belongings in suitcases under the beds. Many of the youths could not even afford tea. Instead, they drank "student tea," a concoction of hot water and sugar...
...added, "I remember all the times I would be in some disgusting hostel and being incredibly hot--with sweat pouring down my face--thinking, 'what the hell am I doing here...
These new-old students are participants in Elderhostel, a program that combines the low cost of youth-hostel living with the challenge of college courses. The only admission requirement is that students be at least 60 years old (or accompanied by a senior citizen). Founded by former Teacher Martin Knowlton, 64, Elderhostel picks up where most adult-education classes leave off. After spending four years walking through Europe and observing adult-education programs, Knowlton came back to the U.S. determined to eliminate "a lot of the negatives associated with retirement." He believes that "when you're older you learn...
Things get worse in the mountaintop hostel; the men who descend to the village to buy provisions are beaten up regularly. Yet no one thinks this strange; no one seems to be afflicted by a foreboding of doom. The book ends flatly, without the customary distant rumbling of a world's end and with no sense of cautionary exhortation by the author. Any such message-that tribalistic savagery is mankind's eternal, bone-bred evil, perhaps-would be excessive. Appelfeld simply and affectingly bears witness, and in the end, his sole, muted voice is more effective than...
...Polish agency Interpress. Among the fees: $70 just to get into a room with telephones and telex transmission machines, with further costs for actually using the facilities; up to $150 a night for double hotel rooms or, when they were full, $45 a night for space in a youth hostel; $230 a day for a Ford Granada car and driver; up to $260 to ride in a press bus following the Pope along his route; $1,350 to ride in a Soviet M12 helicopter for three hours (which almost certainly meant landing far away from where the Pope touched down...