Jason Porath

I am going to murder everyone in my hostel.

Let me give you a timeline of events for last night:

• 11:00 PM  — Get back to hostel from a rousing night of karaoke with ex-JET friends Nick and Tree.
• 12:00 AM — Get to bed.
• 1:00 AM — Nervous Japanese roomie Tsutomu gets in, and spends fifteen minutes playing with his plastic bag collection, seemingly in an attempt to keep us all up.
• 2:00 AM — Drunk Peruvian roomie Raoul gets back, knocking on the door madly, because he has lost his (second) cardkey. Gets in and proceeds to throw up in a bag for thirty minutes.
• 5:00 AM — Neckbeard (a very old, senile man with a 3-inch thick white beard growing out of one side of his neck, but not the other) gets up and decides to rustle plastic bags and rip apart newspapers for the next three hours. No reason is given.
• 7:00 AM — Tsutomu gets up and joins Neckbeard in rearranging his plastic bag collection.
• 8:00 AM — Creepy overweight French writer Louis (?) proceeds to yell at them, claiming they are a public nuisance and disturbing the peace. Neckbeard points out it is 8:00 and he should be up anyway.
• 8:15 AM — Having breakfast with mother-and-daughter pair Darlene and Xena (yes, after the TV show), when random nosy Kiwi lady butts in and proceeds to talk about how terrible the holocaust was and how the Germans should still be ashamed for everything their parents and grandparents did.
• 8:30 AM — Once more, as soon as I enter the shower, the mysterious Shower Bandit shows up, and proceeds, as usual, to stand ten feet from my stall and have his usual jesus-man-go-see-a-fucking-doctor coughing fit for thirty minutes.
• 9:00 AM — Exit the shower to find that the Shower Bandit is actually Louis. Who is naked. And attempting to wash his genitals in the sink.
• 9:15 AM — Bid farewell to previous day’s companion Barbara, the easily-befuddled middle-aged Kiwi woman, who hugs me tight and says, “I’ll miss you, Steve.” We do not exchange contact information.
• 9:30 AM — Louis finds me doing laundry and proceeds to interrogate me as to which southeast Asian nationality has the most weak-willed women, and which will perform the most depraved sex acts (answer: “How the fuck should I know, go away, you are scary and weird.”)
• 10:00 AM — Tsutomu comes to ask me to translate the phrase “Full of bullshit” for him, as Louis and Raoul have just taught him.

More specifics on actual travels later. My time in Newcastle and London has been lovely, I’ve been able to meet up with a lot of JET and CG industry friends, and I’ve had quite a good time, but damn if my hostel hasn’t been a hotbed of weirdness.

Tsutomu, Barbara, Kumie, Raoul, Xena, and me