Man, that Johnson and Wales number is probably built for volume cooking where the stock gets cooked down hard before it ever hits a plate. Here's the thing nobody ever brings up: salt level in a stock isn't a fixed target, it depends on how much you're gonna reduce it. If your stock goes into a sauce that simmers for two hours, that 1.5 ounces per gallon might end up just right. But if you're using it as is for a soup, you just wrecked the whole pot. The school number isn't wrong, it just assumes a certain path after the stock is done. Salt to taste still wins, you just have to taste it at the end of the dish, not the start.

Sleepy brain sees shapes not words, same reason I spot typos in signs driving past.

The bar crawl thing is what gets people every time. Hostels don't really cost $19, they cost $19 plus the group dinner you feel weird skipping plus the pub night you got talked into plus the next day you waste being tired. Do that math across ten days and suddenly your sister's cheap hostels are costing you $60 a day. Private rooms on off-peak Tuesdays are the real hack here, and if you book a few of those midweek you can mix it up, stay in a couple hostels for the social part early on and then go private when you actually need sleep. Ten days is long enough that you will burn out if every night is a dorm. I would do three or four hostel nights max and put the rest in cheap privates or guesthouses.