the improbability drove you here
click here to go back to the heart of gold hostel berlin

a starship that looks a bit like a hostel


and is mostly harmless, like the description for the planet earth in this little book, called the

hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

...:

Earth: Mostly Harmless.

But why Heart of Gold ?

Because the heart of gold was this secret project,
which the Imperial Galactic Government started on Damogran, the desert planet -
because Damogran was so deserted and the Heart of Gold was so secret.

The result of this project was a ship, photon driven, with the powerful built in
improbability drive.

The heart of gold was one hundred and fifty
metres long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white and
mindboggingly beautiful. At the heart of it, unseen, lay a small gold box
which carried within it the most brain-wretching device ever conceived, a
device which made this starship unique in the history of the galaxy, a
device after which the ship had been named - The Heart of Gold.

"Wow", said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold. There wasn't much
else he could say.
He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press.
"Wow."

and later on he just stole the Heart of Gold, because this was the reason he had become the
President of the Universe.

Now we have our own Heart of Gold - something that we believe has a golden box somewhere,
we just could not find it yet

and we know it has this improbability drive, where

anything ca happen,

one just has to know how probable or
impossible something exactly is.. and there is a few ways to find out.

But then what has a hostel got to do with a starship ?

Hmm, nothing - at first sight,
but on second thought:
there is a crew, this friendly staff you will meet.
there is these little things you always wonder how they got there and who has decided to put them there or do it like that,
and why nobody realized, that this was completely stupid and why then nobody removed or changed it..
then you have passengers, the backpackers -

with towels



(A towel, the hitchhikers guide says), is about the most massively useful thing an
interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value -
you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons
of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches
of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it
beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon;
use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use
in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes
or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a
mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't
see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in
emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it
if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some
reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker
has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in
possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask,
compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit
etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker
any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might
accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who
can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it,
struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his
towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.) HMM....

these passengers need cabins..

which means rooms in general, but because of the need of space for all the technique to make
such a ship fly, these rooms have bunk beds - just like on ships and just like in hostel dorms..

you have the improbability drive in the hostel: anything can happen to you -
meet friends, find girl or boy friends, have your first important contact to other cultures
- all kinds of things that make life real and backpacking one of the best experiences in life.

you

explore

in a starship, you explore the next galaxy, new planets, meet other travellers,
climb mountains, find empty beaches, little hideaways from daily life.

And because noone knows your background until you tell them you can find out who you really are,
because any emotion you have and any respect you get, and any problem you have, and if you make friends and
how you loose them, who helps you, who doesn't care about you, who wants to keep in touch,
why you stay awake all night, and how you got to one town although you wanted to be somewhere alse at that time,
and what books you read and what music you hear and why you don't have a problem loosing your nicely packed
CD-Box, and what you feel when you wake up and what this all means to you when you get home - if you ever do -
is the exact reason, why you ever left.

A starship and thus this Hostel is the place to be.