After exploring Old Town of San Diego and walking around farmer’s market, we reached out homestay. The special thing about our homestay was that it was near to the downtown, Balboa Park and the harbor. Almost everyday we used to walk to Downtown from our Homestay which was 15-20 mins walk. We also had MTS card which allowed us to take bus as well as MTS train rides during our stay in San Deigo. This post shares about our Homestay and my very first experience of AirBNB in US.
Above photograph shows the main entrance gate of the Homestay. Most of the times, host is not around but a lady takes care of the property & guests. There are time slots when you will not find anybody at home, but you would get to know the digital key of locks of this house. When we reached there was nobody but it was pretty easy to enter as our host had shared the key with us. After a while we met Heather who briefed us about our room.
Our room was in basement area of this house and outside the room, there were some interesting seating arrangements around the garden. Although we never stayed that long at our home stay to enjoy these open spaces.
Most of the planes landing at San Diego Airport cross through this part of the town, so expect lot of noise created by these planes. Since our room was in basement, there are relatively less sound but at times the vibrations were scary.
Just outside the Kitchen, there is a seating area surrounded by green plants and from here you see high-rise buildings of San Diego Downtown. This would also put things in perspective when it comes to distance between the downtown area and the homestay.
There is a huge living area in the house which is divided into 3 major seating arrangements. The one you see above is 7-8 seater sofa and just in front of this, there is a dining table which can accommodate 6 people and another set of sofa. This space has lot of collected items along with some books, magazines about Travel & photography.
Here is the third seating space I mentioned above. The living area is in L shape so this is little separated from main seating area and the dining space.
Above photograph shows the dining table. One biggest difference I saw in Homestay of US and India - there is hardly anyone who eats on these dining tables. I noticed that all the guests were eating in their rooms. It was be related to this home-stay or the guests staying in other rooms. But unlike real HomeStays in India wherein hosts are very hospitable and accessible to you, here it was almost impossible for us to reach out to the host if needed.
In our room, we had attached washroom but a smaller one so we used the bigger one close to living room. I guess only we were using this one at that point of time. Either our room was exception with smaller washroom or others were happy with whatever they had.
Kitchen was well equipped with different kinds of utensils and no meal was included. There was a coffee machine which was our main friend in the kitchen.
Everybody is supposed to clean the utensils used. By wash, I mean take the utensils through water and then host puts everything in dish-washer for final cleansing.
There is a huge fridge where you can put your stuff. Most of the guests used to bring breakfast stuff and keep the same in fridge.
This homestay is located around some of the huge and beautiful houses in San Diego. Everyday we used to walk through these lanes towards MTS bus stop. Google was our best friend to locate the spot and which bus or train to catch. Google was always accurate when it comes to time to catch bus or time to reach the final destination etc. This certainly help us planning our commute within the city.
This is one of the views of Downtown while walking from our Homestay towards MTS station.
I loved the way most of the houses in our street had maintained green areas. Above photograph shows one of the green space with adequate seating arrangements.
Above is another seating area with setup for barbeque.
Overall it was very pocket-friendly place to stay and well connected to some of the core areas in San Diego. We certainly recommend the place and would love to answer specific questions if you are planning to book a place to stay in San Diego.
If you liked this post and found it helpful, I would request you to follow these things when traveling -
1. Manage your waste well and don’t litter Use dustbins.
2. Tell us if you went to a place and found it hard to locate a dustbin.
3. Avoid bottle waters in hills. Usually you get clean water in hills and water bottles create lot of mess in our ecosystem.
4. Say big no to plastic and avoid those unhealthy snacks packed in plastic bags. Rather buy fruits.
5. Don't play loud blaring music in forests of jungle camps. You are a guest in that ecosystem and disturbing the locals (humans and animals) is not polite
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