Two months into my sojourn in New Zealand (Nova Zeelanda in Latin!) and I still live in a hostel. Partially, this is because the housing market in Wellington is swamped at the moment; partly this is because I don’t have the money to outfit a swinging bachelor pad (or, as the case may be, even a pitiable hovel); and mostly this is because the twin devils of sloth and misanthropy make me incredibly reluctant to flat-hunt. I don’t want to spend a day off looking through the paper, running around town, and pretending to be “chill.” My days off are full of eating, reading, aimless walks, and the Mass in Latin, and this is how I want them to remain. So it’s the hostel.
I. Hate. Hostel people.
They’re exponentially more aggravating than ordinary people, of whom I’m no ardent fan. Most of them are German, and the reasons Germans are exasperating could fill a whole ‘nother post; nay, a whole ‘nother blog; nay, a whole ‘nother internet. They speak to each other in German, which is a horrible language to have to hear. It is harsh, yet has that weird bouncy lilt that makes everything sound insincere. Also, it reminds me of the Holocaust, for some reason. This one German girl - let’s call her Some Vapid Krautess - was stridently bitching about United States foreign policy. Say what you will about Iraq, or Vietnam, or [third world country where things did not go as we had hoped], the linchpin of American foreign policy has never been “I don’t care if it’s winter, if we shoot enough peasants they’ll have to surrender, and if that doesn’t work we’ll fight a three-front war! That’ll show these countries we’ve needlessly provoked into the most terrible war ever fought who’s boss! Hey, let’s waste able-bodied men running camps to kill various groups of people! And bomb Coventry!” Fucking Germans. One of them tried to befriend me, but his efforts consisted entirely of trying to explain cricket, and daily inviting me to play poker. This is not the way to my heart, as it does not pass through “Martini Pass” or at any point go down “Oral Sex Lane.”
Germans aside, there are the Damnhippies, an ethnicity unto themselves. I have a deep, abiding hatred of hippies, as previously discussed, and it’s so deep-seated and so visceral that even peripheral hippie-things fill me with a desire to vote for Charlton Heston and have a nice rare steak that I bought with money I made working, just to spite them. I walked into the hostel kitchen one night and a girl was sauteeing bok choy and I was so stricken I had to sit down. Can you think of a more hippie food than sauteed bok choy? It satisfies the three gullets of the Hippie-Food Cerberus: it gives no one pleasure to eat, inconveniences no animal (save the bok choy mites, whose rights are ignored!), and is utterly insufficient nutrition. No one grew up to run Vermont’s third-largest marijuana plantation, sorry, “bud hook-up,” on sauteed bok fucking choy.
Hippies are one of the primary sources of the greatest bane of hostel life: Constant Fucking Noise. No one - not one person, ever since Adam took Eve aside and asked if she, too, had noticed that everyone else was acting like a chimpanzee - has ever been pleased to know that someone nearby was an amateur bongocero. Bongos have their place, and that is in the recording studio, on the stage, and in the 1950s. Bongos should not be allowed out of these few places, because Certain People will play them.
For hours.
Starting at eleven P.M.
Fortunately, occasionally the bongos are drowned out by even louder, ever more horrifying sounds. There is a hierarchy of Obnoxious Hostel sounds, much like poker hands:
Snoring trumps the rustle of furtive masturbation.
Spoken French trumps snoring.
Spanish loudly stage-whispered by your bed trumps spoken French.
Welsh loudly spoken by your bed trumps stage-whispered Spanish.
Guy With Guitar sawing his way through something he seems to think is “White Wedding” trumps Welsh.
Bongos trump, with difficulty, Guy With Guitar.
Loud conversation between two not-particularly-interesting people who are using their mutual, barely-overlapping broken English or German to talk about going to very, very popular tourist places like Queenstown trumps, after a pitched battle, bongos.
Horny, very drunk, Maori transvestite screaming blasphemy trumps everything and is the nuclear option of hostel noise.
Let’s go back to my arch-nemesis, Guy With Guitar. He just doesn’t get it! Owning a guitar and knowing three chords doesn’t make you a musician - I pretended to be interested in a conversation today, but I don’t call myself an actor. Another fine point often missed by GWG is the seemingly basic idea that most songs are composed of two things: a “tune,” and “some words.” These must both be carried throughout the song and not abandoned in the middle for deeper harbors. Just because you know how to play -sort of - the fist “ba-DUH-DUH, ba-DUH-DUH, ba-duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH-DUH” does not mean you can play “La Grange.” It does not count as singing “La Grange” if you just say “Shake your money-maker” five times in a row at a random point in the middle of the “song” you seem bound and determined to pass off as “La Grange.” Guy With Guitar almost definitely doesn’t know that that song is about a cathouse, the same one discussed in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” and that La Grange is a town on the road between Austin and Houston, and he surely has never been there. In August. Guy With Guitar has no ZZ TOP cred. (I do, because my mother used to live with someone who married someone who toured with them THE DRUMMER FOR ZZ TOP [I called Mom today and asked. She said he’s afraid of ghosts but pretty cool.] Admittedly this is very marginal ZZ TOP cred, but I reiterate that I HAVE BEEN TO LA GRANGE SEVERAL TIMES.)
The final, and most pervasive, annoyance of hostel life - the thorn in the crown - is the complete absence of solitude. There’s always someone there. They may be asleep, they may speak only Serbo-Croat, they may even be on the other side of a thin wall - but they’re there. Talking. Breathing. Existing. I’m considering going into one of the viewing booths at the sex shop - not to masturbate, just to be by myself for the length of time it takes Billy the New Office Boy to realize that the way to the top is by going down.
For what it’s worth, the Hostel People think I’m an absolute freak and probably have started locking up their valuables. The way they look at me when they find me reading quietly, writing a letter or story, drinking a glass of port, or frying something for dinner is the same nervous, bewildered glance they’d probably give one of their own if he put down his bongos, slowly disrobed, and began, silently, to weep.