Saturday nights abroad when you don't drink - what actually worked after two years of getting it wrong
Evenings are the hardest part of travelling alone and nobody warns you, because the advice is all about daytime. The default social venue in most places is built around drinking, and if you are not, the evening can go from six o'clock to bed with nothing in it.
Two years of this. Here is what I tried, what failed, and the thing that turned out to matter more than the activity.
Worked
- Cooking in a hostel kitchen at around seven. By a distance the best one. It is the only place where a conversation starts because you are both doing something, rather than because you have decided to talk to a stranger. It also self-selects for people not going out.
- Anything with a class attached. Cooking classes, language exchanges, a run club, a bouldering gym. Structure means you are not performing sociability; the activity does the work.
- Live music at a small venue, arriving early. The drinking is incidental, the point is on the stage, and nobody notices what is in your glass.
- Night walks. I resisted calling this an activity for a long time and I now think it is one. Cities are different after dark, and it is the only thing on this list that needs no arrangement and no other people.
- The late dinner, alone, with a book, at the bar of a proper restaurant. Counter seating specifically: you are near people without being seated as a party of one in the middle of a room.
Did not work
- Going to a bar anyway and ordering something soft. Fine for an hour, then everyone else changes speed and you do not. It is not awkward, it is just that the evening stops being shared some time around ten.
- Waiting for a hostel common room to happen. The common room at nine is often empty because everyone has gone out. The window was three hours earlier and I kept missing it.
- Organised bar crawls. Obviously. Included because I tried twice, hoping.
What actually mattered
Timing, more than the activity. Almost everything sociable on this list happens between six and nine, and the drinking version of the evening starts at ten. I spent my first year going out at the hour that suited people doing something else, finding it hollow, and concluding the problem was me being sober.
Move the evening three hours earlier and most of the difficulty goes away.
@hostels_still_work · 3w ago · 4 replies
"The window was three hours earlier" is the single most useful line here and it applies well beyond not drinking.
I drink and I still find the ten o'clock version of a hostel worse than the seven o'clock version. At seven people are cooking, arriving, comparing routes, and open. By ten the group has formed and gone, and whoever is left is either waiting for something or not looking for company at all.
The mechanism is that at seven everyone is individually unattached, and by ten they are in a group. Joining a group of strangers is a completely different social act from talking to another individual at a hob, and the second one is easy.
So the advice generalises: whatever the venue, arrive at the hour when people are still separate. That is usually earlier than the hour the place is busiest, which is why "when is it lively" is the wrong question to ask at reception.
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@run_club_abroad · 3w ago · 3 replies
The three-hours-earlier point generalises to a whole category: anything with a scheduled start and a shared activity works, and anything that is just people being in a room does not.
Parkrun and the local run clubs are in most cities, free, at nine in the morning, and nobody cares whether you drink. Same for climbing gyms and language exchanges. The activity does the introducing.
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@board_game_cafe · 2w ago
Board game cafes are the evening version of this and they exist almost everywhere now.
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@hostels_still_work · 3w ago
Structure beats atmosphere, which is a much more useful rule than anything about venues.
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