Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Not Quite the Beginning - the story of the 3 little pigs

Here I am, sitting in my first-ever hostel in Nice, France (which is, indeed, very nice), decided where to start. Since I've been traveling for almost a month, it doesn't quite feel like a start at this point - though I suppose it is for you, dear reader (aka some of my friends with time to kill).


Quick ba
ckground then: My name is Sam, I'm an American university student, and I'll be studying abroad in Toulouse for a school year. I made my way to France August 1st with my family, they ditched me on the 12th, and now I'm making the rounds of France on my own until school starts in September.

Now that's out of the way.



So let me tell you the story of my first night staying in my first hostel, because it's possibly the scariest/funniest thing to happen to me yet.
I was a bit nervous going into this whole
hostel thing. Before now, I've been staying in places where I have my own room, and my own bathroom, and even a TV if I'm lucky, though rarely lucky enough for a good English-language station.
Maybe, I thought, they won't fill up the room. Maybe there will be super nice people I can go traveling with. Maybe they'll all be super creepy kleptos who steal my things. The reality is, I fear, well....you'll see.

When I get there, the only person in the room is a nice German girl who speaks perfect English, so I get to choose a nice top bunk right by the window, and I have a nice talk with my new sort-of friend.
Then the Brits arrive.
Now, after a few days, I know 2 of their names, though I have no idea which one is which, so let's just name them the 3 little pigs. They are not literally pigs - they are actually just the incarnations of some of my worst hostel nightmares.
They seemed cute at first, but then midnight arrives, and the first bloke, the one with a house of bricks, stumbles in drunk and locks himself in the bathroom. Locks himself as in, he can't get out of the bathroom. This creates quite a ruckus, as you might imagine. Then he drops into bed and is asleep instantly. Not too bad, though the debacle did wake me up, and I was planning on waking early the next morning, so I was a little ticked. But hey, not so bad, I thought. If that's the worst this place is throwing at me I'll be fine.

Wrong.

The pig with a house of sticks comes in. I sleep through this, but then, in my dream, I'm all of a sudden attacked by an angry grizzly bear. I drift back awake to find that the sound was actually from the limey in the next bed over, who was snoring like a chainsaw that drank its weight in whiskey. The sound was insistent, loud, and impossible to sleep through.
Oh great, I thought, a snorer. Fantastic. I'll get through this.
Wrong.

In comes the pig with his house of bricks. But he doesn't come back alone. You see, I was back in dreamland again, and in my dream, the world started shaking. But the world was, in fact, actually shaking. I wake up, and the bunk bed is shaking pretty violently. I scramble to find reasons for this sudden earthquake: he's having trouble getting into bed, there's a bug in his pants he's trying to shake out, the poor guy's having a nightmare. Nope.
Ringo was actually, on his first night in a 5-bed hostel room, playing bottom-bunk bingo with some Australian "lass," right on the bed below me. You see, I know this because she was still there the next morning. Pretty much class all the way, don't you think? And seriously, the room wasn't that big - his "mates" were no more than 5 feet away from him the whole time - and he was on a
bottom bunk.
I've heard stories of people in dorms at Tufts bringing home a friend while their roommate's trying to sleep in the next bed over, and it always struck me as being only a few feet away from a menage a trois, and pretty stupid. But hey, maybe you didn't have many options, and you've been living with the guy/gal for some time now, I don't know. But this guy's in a tiny little 5 bed room, on the bottom of a bunk bed. And I'm wondering afterward how well he actually knows his travel buddies, and whether the better he knows them, the creepier it is, or the other way around.
The moral of the story is: Yuck.

But the story ends happily enough, since I talked to the three little pigs the next day, and they turned out to be alright guys, and they managed to go out and drink last night without waking me up on their return, so I'll forgive them. Plus I got to travel with other people for the first time in a while, instead of going solo, when I tagged along with them to Eze and Monaco, so it turned out okay in the end.
But seriously. The bottom bunk in a 5-bed room.
Class all the way, those Brits.
But now for the good news: This is the view of Nice from my room in the aforementioned hostel.

Word of the Day:
Dormir
To sleep

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