Tuesday, 5 June 2007

Young Peoples Home

After a restless night spent trying to get to sleep with my body adamantly telling me that it wasn't bed time. I woke up and had a look around the hostel, I was a small place and seemed pretty empty and dull. Luckily the power of www.hostelworld.com is absolute and wherever you are in the world it can find you a good place to stay.

I moved to Urban Central voted the 3rd best hostel in the whole of Australia! Its a utopian place here cheap food/beer, lots going on and best of all free shaving foam! I was stuck by how similar this was to an old peoples home, not in terms actual similarity, but in terms of how this place was truly designed for the people that occupied it. I loved the hostel life and started to wonder how much of my youth had I wasted not living in a Hostel and how much I had spent unnecessarily on shaving foam.

There where downsides of course, my room looked like a prison and the view from my window wasn't exactly inspiring.

Also I had to share my room with an Asian guy who simply refused to talk to me.

I went to the new comer's meeting, they gave us a free drink and played us probably the most unhelpful video about Melbourne. The video showed us that Melbourne had shops, museums and lots of things to do, which to be honest I had already assumed. Where the video fell short was that it didn't tell us things we needed to know like for example how to find said attractions, or what they where called so we could look them up.

After the meeting there was a Pub Quiz, normally I am apprehensive about pub quizzes as ... well ... to be honest (probably more hopeful than honest) I think I'm to intelligent for them. For them to ask the kind of questions I know the answers to simply wouldn't be fair on your normal average pub attending guy. Well I hope this explanation is accurate over wise I would have to ask myself some awkward questions as to why someone that's read as many books as me fails to answer so many questions.

So anyway I started to assemble my team basically from the people that weren't already in a team. The all star line up consisted of:

Ben - A surprisingly intelligent guy considering that he believed in Intelligent Design.
Mary - An X stripper with a very good sense of direction.
Girl - Who was borne in London moved to island and liked the movie 'The Commitments' a lot
and of course myself.

I have always found it funny how important pub quizzes become, they start out as fun but by the end of round one the competition spirit has really kicked in. By the third round its normally one of the biggest crimes against humanity to answer any of the questions louder than a hushed whisper in case the others teams hear.

We did very well considering coming third even though most the teams where double our size, well this isn't quite true. My team was in a celebratory mood, they stooped listening as soon as they called us out in third and started to celebrate. Not wanting to destroy moral I didn't point out to them that we had in fact come join third, and that three other teams where joint second. so we had pretty much come last.

1 comment:

Adrian said...

Wow, you met some new people, encountered some cultural barriers, taught me that hostels exist even for people over 25 (is there an age limit?), and entered a quiz - all on day one! Wow!, keep up the momentum!