On my budget – 20 people sleeping in one room and Anglo-Saxon windows (which like the American ones do not open fully) in place – overnight conditions aren't ideal. Luckily, I spend most of my time on the London bus, embracing a varied and exciting scenery.

It's not the city but the stench in the dorm room that has me first falter in my general trust and affection for humanity. On a psychological level I can understand the lack of social intuition on display. Being surrounded by strangers, unknown faces, might give you the idea that there's no real effect to your telephone calls, your midnight chatter, or drunken bedtime shuffle. Polite distance might give you a bit of unfamiliar leeway.

There is the three-headed South American travel group², for example, that has to literally talk throughout bedtime over matters of inexplicable nothingness. There is the woman from South East Asia that takes a live commentary video tour (for who I imagine is her daughter) through the room at 6 in the morning. There are the two guys next to me that manage to snore more or less throughout the night.

I understand this personal inconvenience as a result of such an array of strangers from different continents being stuffed into a single three-story-bunk-beds-filled room. I cannot understand the stench, though. Because it is individual, not social. It produces considerable personal internalities along with the perceptible communal externalities. All of us in the room are adults.

On the personal level I do comprehend the teenage school classes that are filling up both my floor and the floor above. The sounds they're emitting for three days straight, the smell coming from their rooms, their talk, their ignorance is an essential aspect of their age: for a couple of years they'll confusedly stumble through society – learning by doing, understanding boundaries mostly by getting a bloody nose. It's that energy that makes them such a tough experience on everybody else – but as we've all been through it, we know.

I attest to my personal naiveté: about the adult stench I didn't know. What saves me is a new, very (very) effective set of earplugs and the fact that my bunk is on the top and next to the air condition.

What am I doing here? In a dorm room next to rowdy male teenagers, serviced at reception by what seem to be gap year students, and crammed together in a room with a wide assortment of people from all continents on low-budget travel adventures.

The direct answer is: I don't have the money to spend. Plus, the rather abstract truth beyond would be: I want to be in the midst of things.

To be fair, there could be a reality, though, where I do actually care about my living standard enough that I would reserve a certain amount of money for decent, high-ranked-and-rated Airbnbs – in order to have a comfortable time.

Yet, it's not the reality I choose to live in. Somehow, mine is littered with the contents of empty soda cans gluing the hallways – sticky, stinky, sometimes dodgy, always loud. There's a traveler's dread I'm pricing in: the fear of being harassed, of not getting any relevant sleep, of getting sick, of being robbed … it remains at the back of my mind. This is my life.

Four nights in one of the most expensive cities here in Europe require the appropriate calculations. For every pound I save sleeping I won't feel as guilty spending one eating. The general admission to most of the museums is free. So, during the day there's mainly the cost of provisions to be factored in.

To me, finding a comfortable place to have coffee+pastry³ and sit down for an hour is an essential part of travel, just as much as finding good local food⁴. I experience another place by actually doing the things I would do at home. Only in tighter succession. – The comforts of home: a well-stocked kitchen, my own bathroom and a large bed, are negligible in this scenario.

An acquaintance of mine told me to just get an all-day bus pass⁵ and then ride all across the stretched-out geography of London. Probably the cheapest and most straightforward way to get a sense and feel of the city.

After a couple of routes, I realize that the conundrum with being in my thirties and being in London for the first time is the familiarity. From the second floor on the bus, I marvel at the scenery: be it the brick house rows or the sky-high development projects, the fat river, the bridges, or the red buses themselves – I've seen it all those years on screens and lived it in literature. In a very bewildering way I find myself coloring in pretty intricate black-and-white sketches.

As I make my way from the Borough through Islington up to Tottenham, I revel (in a way) in the multinational, accent-rich, audiovisual experience I was obviously expecting to make. With voyeuristic pleasure I'm listening in on phone calls, following royal mail employee's lingering cigarette smell, and lining up young Brit's clothes.

In aphorism: I hoped to find Finsbury Park is just the way that it extends before me now.