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I stayed five days at Copenhagen Danhostel while I drank in the sights, sounds, and tastes of Denmark’s capital city--a beautiful place which any solo backpacker in Europe would be crazy not to experience.

My arrival coincided with the start of Distortion, which is basically Europe’s biggest and longest-running block party. I hoped that the crowd at Danhostel would be jammed with people here for the weeklong gauntlet of drinking, music, and dancing–or at least, eager to hit the streets and explore. What I found instead was massive tour groups, predominantly teenage schoolchildren, with a few travelers like myself caught in the whitewash.

Danhostel is incredibly tourist-friendly and it does a superb job of catering to that demographic: there are free walking tours organized in the lobby, a generous breakfast buffet (which cost 74 dkk, or about $13.50), a bar for people to congregate around in the afternoons and evening, and comfortable, clean and modern dormitories. It’s within easy walking distance of Tivoli Gardens, Strøget, the train station, and Christiana.

The problem for people who are not part of a 30-strong group of 16 year-olds out on their first Eurotrip, or a family of four with two young children, is that the same elements which are so enticing to your average tourist don’t necessarily appeal to solo backpackers. In 10 months around Europe I’ve been on one free walking tour and it was pretty lackluster (and of course it wasn’t actually free). Breakfast buffets and bars are great but the cost was almost as much as my daily budget for food. Which leads me to the most underwhelming aspect of Danhostel: the kitchen.

Many of my best memories from staying in hostels involve eating meals and sharing drinks with strangers that I just met–I cook usually cook my own meals to save money but also to find new friends. Compared to the rest of the hostel, which is tastefully designed and pleasantly atmospheric, the kitchen is in desperate need of a makeover.  Despite having the capacity for over a thousand guests, the hostel kitchen is more or less an afterthought–it’s location in the basement, next to the laundry, says enough. This would be a problem in a hostel catering to budget backpackers, but it’s not such a big deal when the clientele come in huge groups and are unlikely to cook a meal themselves. There were no more than 3 or 4 people in the kitchen whenever I was down there, and it was pretty quiet.

Luckily, it’s an easy problem to solve. The breakfast buffet is held upstairs next to the lobby, and there’s an industrial-level kitchen right next to it. At night the kitchen is closed off; why not open it up so people can cook there? It would afford the chance to socialize with people hanging around the lobby–nothing attracts strangers like the smell of cooking food–and would give Danhostel less of a “tour groups only” vibe and make it more welcoming to budget backpackers like myself.

Thanks to Danhostel for giving me a place to stay in Copenhagen–when the kitchen situation has been resolved I’ll be back. Interested in some of the other hostels I’ve stayed at in Europe? Check out Sunset Destination in Lisbon, Sant Jordi in Barcelona, and Cocomama in Amsterdam. If this is your first time visiting my blog, thanks for stopping by! You can follow my blog for free and get updates every time I go somewhere amazing in Europe.

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