[travel] Hostel characters.
May. 20th, 2009 01:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellStaying in hostels and traveling on trains, you meet all kinds of interesting and/or colorful people. Some of it is inspirational. Some of it is pure Jerry Springer.
Here are some highlights, good and bad:
- A 19-year old who's been to more places in the world than I have.
- A woman who is getting a PhD in forsenic Egyptology. She gets to dress and undress the mummies.
- A man who would not stop talking, repeatedly forgot who in the train compartment spoke English vs Russian, and was obsessed with the minutiae of passport stamps and border crossing policy.
- A Brit who left England because the influx of “dark” people was bothering his sense of racial camaraderie with his white brothers. He's been in Poland for the last 11 years, though he hasn't bothered to learn much of the language. The funniest part was that when I had asked him about Warsaw restaurants earlier, he told me about “this awesome Vietnamese place where the food is super cheap” It was funny because he was so totally nonchalant about his racism.
- A French-Moroccan woman who chats up Egyptian locals in Arabic in the women's car in the subway, gently encouraging them to be more independent and assertive.
- A 19-year-old guy who got a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv with less than two weeks of money left in the bank. His plan was to look for work, though he seemed to spend most of his first week drinking on the beach and attending strip bars.
- A woman of African descent who claimed to be from Spain but spoke excellent French, poor Spanish, and no English. She leaned on me for all kinds of advice about getting around Switzerland by train and where she could find work, and had a lot of trouble keeping her bathtowel wrapped around her breasts while talking to me.
- An older man who had traveled in Switzerland in the 1970s, and was seeking to interivew people who had been to Switzerland multiple times about how things had changed. Interlaken and Zurich had both changed a good bit in the last 10 years, so I had much to say.
- A woman who had traveled to Israel with her two children in order to prove Jewish ancestry so she could marry a rabbi who (even by her own admission) sounded like a total sleazebag. Meanwhile, her son had become completely transformed with newfound self confidence in the past two weeks while off at an archaelogical dig in Jordan that had been personally organized by their princess. At 14 he had more or less become the de facto leader of the family, with everyone taking their cues from him.
- A woman whose longtime boyfriend broke up with her in the first week of her yearlong solo trip around the world. (I suppose it's better than waiting until the last week)
- A very young kid who had the following conversation with a Greek shop owner:
“Do you know where I can get a tattoo today?”
“It's Easter. Everybody's closed.”
“But I need one today! There must be someplace that's open.”
“I don't know any. Look around Omonia tomorrow.”
“C'mon man, you don't know any tattoo shops? That's so lame.”
- A British couple that had saved up for several months to do the massive 700-ft bungee jump off the dam that James Bond did in Goldeneye. The dam is in Switzerland, not Russia as it is in the movie.
Here are some highlights, good and bad:
- A 19-year old who's been to more places in the world than I have.
- A woman who is getting a PhD in forsenic Egyptology. She gets to dress and undress the mummies.
- A man who would not stop talking, repeatedly forgot who in the train compartment spoke English vs Russian, and was obsessed with the minutiae of passport stamps and border crossing policy.
- A Brit who left England because the influx of “dark” people was bothering his sense of racial camaraderie with his white brothers. He's been in Poland for the last 11 years, though he hasn't bothered to learn much of the language. The funniest part was that when I had asked him about Warsaw restaurants earlier, he told me about “this awesome Vietnamese place where the food is super cheap” It was funny because he was so totally nonchalant about his racism.
- A French-Moroccan woman who chats up Egyptian locals in Arabic in the women's car in the subway, gently encouraging them to be more independent and assertive.
- A 19-year-old guy who got a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv with less than two weeks of money left in the bank. His plan was to look for work, though he seemed to spend most of his first week drinking on the beach and attending strip bars.
- A woman of African descent who claimed to be from Spain but spoke excellent French, poor Spanish, and no English. She leaned on me for all kinds of advice about getting around Switzerland by train and where she could find work, and had a lot of trouble keeping her bathtowel wrapped around her breasts while talking to me.
- An older man who had traveled in Switzerland in the 1970s, and was seeking to interivew people who had been to Switzerland multiple times about how things had changed. Interlaken and Zurich had both changed a good bit in the last 10 years, so I had much to say.
- A woman who had traveled to Israel with her two children in order to prove Jewish ancestry so she could marry a rabbi who (even by her own admission) sounded like a total sleazebag. Meanwhile, her son had become completely transformed with newfound self confidence in the past two weeks while off at an archaelogical dig in Jordan that had been personally organized by their princess. At 14 he had more or less become the de facto leader of the family, with everyone taking their cues from him.
- A woman whose longtime boyfriend broke up with her in the first week of her yearlong solo trip around the world. (I suppose it's better than waiting until the last week)
- A very young kid who had the following conversation with a Greek shop owner:
“Do you know where I can get a tattoo today?”
“It's Easter. Everybody's closed.”
“But I need one today! There must be someplace that's open.”
“I don't know any. Look around Omonia tomorrow.”
“C'mon man, you don't know any tattoo shops? That's so lame.”
- A British couple that had saved up for several months to do the massive 700-ft bungee jump off the dam that James Bond did in Goldeneye. The dam is in Switzerland, not Russia as it is in the movie.
