Hostel

Like I said before, I am not a huge fan of sleeping in a room with other people. Especially people that smell or drink tons or whatever. For the first week here, I was all alone in my room. It was great. There are three rooms, and the lady here always tried to keep people out of my room. I really enjoyed it. After a week and a few days, a guy came. He is Brazilian and he was great. Very nice and not the crazy partying type at all. Other than walking in on him when he was getting dressed, things were fine. That second weekend, I noticed some stuff in the room. We had a new roommate. I went to bed before he got back that night, but woke up and found him sleeping almost naked. I thought that was kind of weird, but whatever.

I thought about acting like I didn't speak any English when I finally met him. When he came into the room, I said something to him in Portuguese. He responded that he spoke English or Spanish. There was my opportunity, and I blew it. We started talking in English. He actually wasn't too annoying, but he wouldn't really resist my polite refusals of his invitations to go get something to drink and watch Brazilian girls dance. He tried picking up on the reception lady at the hostel too, and left that night, which was very nice.

After that, I was back to my own room for a little bit. Then last week it started to rain. After it rained, it poured, proverbially speaking. One guy was in my room last week for one night. That just makes me nervous for some reason. He came in after I fell asleep, and was coughing the whole night. Great, I thought, this dude is leaving swine flu here for me. He left the next day. But around that time, these girls from another part of Brazil came. One of them rivaled the other girl I was talking about in the last post as far as annoyingness goes. Loud, over inquisitive, too talkative, etc. I started to eat as fast as I could for dinner and leave to get out of there.

Last weekend the place was pretty much full. These girls, a guy from Brazil who I never saw without a beer (even at 8:30 in the a.m.) and supposedly did some pretty questionable things here, two guys from the capital of Brazil who were pretty cool, and lots of other people. Two guys from Espírito Santo, Brazil were there, as was a French kid who is staying for a year maybe came. He is in my room, as were a few others.

Friday night, this guy who probably weighs about 250 and is probably 45 or 50 slept in our room. I knew that this was trouble as soon as he stepped into the room. For some reason, I knew he would be a snorer when I saw the size of his stomach. And then I knew it when I could hear him breathing through his nose. I won't name any names, but I've known some snorers. This guy was the worst out of all of them. The French kid kept kicking this guy's bed because it was so loud. It wasn't your usual two-sound snore (breathing in and breathing out). It was a breathing in, then like an extended gutteral final breathe, and then breathing out. It was three sounds in each breathe, and these were loud. I was so glad that he only stayed one night.

There was even a guy from Mozambique in our place for a few days. He looked just like Gandhi. It turns out that he really liked the French kid, and kept coming to the hostel even after he had gone to stay somewhere else to look for the French kid. Pretty interesting people.

There were lots of interesting stories, and I am glad I never experienced most of them. But I did have a hard time going back to bed at 5 am when the French kid came in, made a lot of noise when looking for something, and smelled like some kind of substance. I think it was marijuana. But I don't know what it smells like! But it was weird not being able to sleep because of a smell, which was something I had never experienced before.

This week has been good and bad with the sleep. It is hard to sleep with lots of noise and all that, and I haven't slept great all summer for whatever reason. But tonight is my last night in the hostel, and from here until forever hopefully I won't be sharing rooms with anyone! Well, until I get married...you know what I meant.