Hostel Mates

In Spain, we met a variety of individuals, particularly through sharing hostel rooms. Our first roommates in Madrid were an Australian couple, a Canadian woman, a college fat boy from Chicago, and a Chinese girl (or should I say woman? She was 30 but really looked no older than us) named Sao Ming, who we ended up befriending and bringing along with us on our trip to Toledo. The Chicago boy was eventually replaced by a college-aged Irish lass who had arrived amidst a group of fourteen other Irish folk staying at the hostel, and when the Australians left, two British girls took their place. The Australians were my favorite. They were from Perth and had just finished a six-week stay in India. The man, Adam, had an impressive knowledge of art, and the woman Michelle was tremendously enthusiastic about everything they had seen and done and was more than willing to share everything with us.

At the next hostel, we spent the tail-end of first night in the company of two American girls. This is because they did not arrive at the room until about 4am. However, they didn’t make much noise, so we barely interacted with them, since we arose quite early the next morning to leave for Alacant, while they slept in. However, when we returned, we found two additional French companions. These two roommates created much more of a problem than the two Americans had. First of all, they got all dressed to go out at 11pm or so and then laid on their bunks jabbering away until at least 12:30am, when they finally left. Then, when they returned at goodness-knows-when, they made so much noise that I finally got up and went to the bathroom. Our door at this hostel tended to get stuck in the open position, so I left it like that deliberately when I left so that I wouldn’t have to take my key with me down the hall. When I returned, the door was shut. I knocked. I could hear the French girls laughing inside. I had to knock four times before one of them opened the door. “Oh,” she said, “sorry.” Shockingly, no one else in the room had awoken. I crawled back to my top bunk and tried not to think of evil things I could leave in their bunks the day Angela and I would leave.

The following day, the last set of bunkbeds filled up. This time, it was a pair of Chinese girls who joined us. I guess Angela had had her fill of speaking Mandarin with Sao Ming in Madrid, because as soon as they arrived prattling away in their foreign tongue, she whispered to me, “I do not speak Chinese. I am from Hawaii.” (That was our joke: that she was Hawaii and I was from Malasia.) So when the girls inevitably asked where we were from, I replied that we were from America. One of the girls wanted to know if it was true that people were allowed to carry guns in America. I said yes and tried to explain that you had to have a license, but she just stared with wide eyes and asked, wasn’t I scared? Helplessly, I just said, “Not really.” Then, she wanted to know if there were gangsters and discrimination, like in some recent movie she had seen. How could I explain “kind of yes, kind of no” to someone who had no concept of what it was like to live in such a diverse place? I started to try, but I don’t think her English was good enough for me to even begin such a discussion, so I just eventually trailed off. Some things are just not meant to be discussed with strangers.

For all the trouble I had with the French girls in Valencia, two of our roommates in Barcelona definitely won the prize for being the most interesting. At first, we shared the room with four people: a couple from the states whom we determined were only traveling partners, since the boy had to have been gay, and a pair of German girls who we presumed to be about eighteen years old. The couple moved on after the first night, leaving only us and the girls. First off, these girls were total slobs. Usually, the tiny spaces you are allotted by the confines of a hostel force you to be neat; there is simply no room to leave you stuff lying anywhere. However, if you have no regard for others’ personal space, then I suppose it is perfectly logical to leave clothing on the floor exactly where you take them off and purses spilling out all over the place. Then, these girls went in and out of the room at all hours of the night. The spoke a little English, as did the boys we could hear them meeting in the hallway, and it became extremely obvious what all of their excitement was leading up to when, before leaving the room one night, they shoved condoms into their back pockets. Personally, I would have liked to see how they managed in such small bunk beds. The bottom bunk is so low, a person can’t sit up without smacking his or her head, and the top—which isn’t all that far from the ceiling—has railings sticking out all over to prevent a sleeper from falling out. Someone in that group must have been some gymnast.