Quiet Asian, Sleeping American

Well well well, I've been very happy the past couple of days, firstly in order to atone for my charity sins I have just founded a new and honest charity http://www.sponsorabackpacker.com/. I've adjusted my various profiles and signatures on web pages I frequent to link to it. I ask that you please do the same and also email all your friends lets launch this great charity and start an Internet phenomena together!

The past couple of days I've been on a date, its been great! Sadly Ms X wishes to remain anonymous which is reasonable considering the undue pressure that would be caused by having her life read about by literally ten's of readers everyday. I am completely happy to share all the personal details of my life, but feel I don't have the right to share anthers especially (well to be honest mainly) when she knows about the blog and can read it and get annoyed. I will keep this blog more secret in future to protect its integrity.

All I can say that early one morning round her house (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) she made me Vegemite on toast. Don't eat it - dispute its name the closest thing to a vegetable it contains is yeast extract and it tastes suspiciously similar to Marmite.

Being the accomplished blogger that I have become I'm not going to let the fact I'm not allowed to write about the past couple of days stop me from making a great entry. Where would we be if Shakespeare had decided not to write just because he had nothing to write about?


Room mate update:

One of the things I love most about hostels is the people you meet and share a room with, here's an update about the people I share with.



Quiet Asian - I woke up one morning to find out he had left without saying a word. Who'd have thought it? However I did hear him talk once, he was asleep and said a few angry random Japanese words. Well I assume they where random as he was asleep. I don't speak Japanese so they may have made perfect sense.



Dreads - Dreads has been in my room for a while, when I first spoke to him he said he had just been on holiday to Fuji and would I like to see his photos. Having never seen Fuji before I jumped at the chance, now this is where me and Dreads started to part ways. I always had to repeat everything I said to him, he was Spanish and was trying to make me feel like my English was bad. I spoke slowly and clearly using simple words and tenses, but he always without fail made me repeat the same thing twice. Maybe he learned English of a tape where they always said everything at least twice. The more worrying thing about him was that nearly every photo of him in Fuji was a close up shot of him with his top off. You could barley see any of Fuji at all and after about 10 photos like this I put the camera down. This angered Dreads who would pick up the camera every time I put it down and give it back to me until I had seen all 117 calender shots of him in Fuji.


The Sleeper - The sleeper was American I knew this from the one time I bumped into him at the bar. A pleasant chap I was happy to finally have a normal room mate. In his first few days here he was jet lagged like the best of us when we arrive. Instead of adjusting like normal people do, he just started sleeping more and more. To the point you could now almost guarantee that whenever you enter the room he would be there to grown at you. Lunch time, after work, evening or late at night now no longer mattered to him for he was the Sleeper!


Shavo - My new room mate, I have only two bits of information about him on file at present, one that it takes him an inordinately long time to shave his head. the first time I bumped into him in the bathroom and hes head was already looking completely shaven. I went to the toilet, brushed my teeth, had a shower and even a shave and left with him still shaving his head. I was tempted to shave my own head and race him, I was confident of my victory despite his head start of already being finished. I have shaved my own head a few times and I admit it is an awkward situation but he had all the tools he needed, a shaver and two mirrors, and he just seemed to be shaving the same bits over and over again.

This made a lot more sense when I found the next bit of information about Shavo came to light, his locker looks like the suitcase from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This guy did a lot of drunks, the smell of skunk escaped his locker and give our room that final University halls of residence touch that it had been missing up to this point.

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.