It might be 20 years since the Berlin wall came down, but if you check into The Ostel, Berlin's new GDR-designed hostel, you'd be forgiven for thinking time had stood still.
Full of details to delight even the most ostalgic (nostalgic for life in the former East "Ost" Germany) of visitors, The Ostel cashes in on the trend for recreating aspects of daily life and culture of the former GDR.
Housed in an original Plattenbau, a typical East German building constructed of large, prefabricated concrete slabs, The Ostel offers dorm rooms, private rooms and a GDR Holiday Apartment that can sleep up to six. Rooms cost from €9 per person per night.
We can see The Ostel's Communist kitsch vibe and its proximity's to some of the best of Berlin's nightlife making it a firm favourite in the Berlin stag / hen repertoire.
If stepping back in time is your thing make sure you take a tour of Berlin in an old Trabbi - another East Berlin icon - to add to the GDR experience. Visit www.trabi-safari.de for more information.
The Ostel
Wriezener Karree 5, 10243, Berlin, Germany; Tel: +49 30 25 76 86 60; Fax: +49 30 25 76 88 07; Email: contact@ostel.eu; Web: www.ostel.eu.
Photo Credits: The Ostel ©OSTEL GbR; Trabant by Genial23.
The people over at Worldhum have reported on an interesting entrepreneurial idea from a wiley Swede: an 80 bed hostel built inside a grounded Boeing 747.
According to Worldhum's post the hostel is to be fitted into a Boeing 747 that has been parked at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport since 2002.
Oscar Diös, the man behind this plan, hopes to open a chain of similar "Jumbo Hostels" at airports around the world.
"The challenge is that nobody has done this before, so there's no precedent. But essentially it’s like fitting out any kind of metal barracks," Diös told newspaper UNT.
Will it be soundproof I wonder?
