Hostel Shenanigans

After taking Daiana & Emma up on their offer for the room in the flat, I took over most of my stuff on Saturday so I would have less to carry when I actually moved in on Sunday. I was greeted by Daiana and her friend Luciana, who was also from Argentina. I chatted with them for a while, had some tea, then went back to the hostel to hang out with the group there. As I mentioned before, I spent my first few nights at the Surf and Snow hostel recuperating and going to bed early. On my last night there, however, I decided it was only appropriate to be social & have a fun night hanging out with the hostel group. They always began their evenings together down in the kitchen, which was oddly located in the basement.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the SNS hostel had some pretty funny security precautions. Most of the main areas of the hostel had their own security codes that you had to punch in on a keypad next to each door handle—one for the kitchen, one for the lounge, one for the front door (only late at night), and one for the specific section of the building in which your dorm room was located. Just to make things even more secure, the codes changed every few weeks. On top of all of these different entrance codes (which were provided to you on a keyring), you also had a regular key for entering your actual dorm room. The amusing thing was that the SNS staff didn’t consider the fact that us backpackers weren’t about to punch in a code every time we entered a room. We instead developed the habit of always leaving the doors cracked open, rendering their code system quite irrelevant. =) Anyway, back to my evening with the hostel group…

I went down to the kitchen (basement) with Ross to meet up with everyone. When we got down there, however, we didn’t see anyone from our group. Ross pointed to the windows along one side of the kitchen & said in his strong Irish accent, “Ah yeah, they must be outside.” I followed him out of the kitchen, around the corner into the laundry room, then up these random wooden stairs that lead to a larger-sized window in the wall. As it turned out, the window lead to a small outdoor area on ground level that belonged to the hostel. It consisted of an area that was like a small, drab alleyway with a couple of chairs, opening up around the corner into a larger area with a surprisingly nice circular table and seating area underneath what resembled a gazebo.

Sitting down around the table were Justin, Nicolas, Manuel, Sam, Francois, Oliver, and a couple of other random guys whose names I never learned. We all played a few rounds of card games and jammed out to songs from Ross’s iPod, which he had somehow managed to hook up to the stereo in the kitchen. Manuel, Francois & I delighted in some hot tea while the others consumed their alcoholic beverages & tried to pour beer into our cups. Justin, Nicolas & Sam (who I had just met for the first time that evening) kept adopting fake accents & asking me to guess where they were from. It was actually quite entertaining since they’d had a few drinks and kept forgetting to maintain their bogus accents, not to mention the fact that their fake Scottish and Portuguese accents were already horrendous to begin with haha.

Besides being my last night in a hostel for a while to come, the night also had particular importance because it was Oliver’s birthday at midnight & it was the Champions League Final for football (soccer)—Barcelona versus Manchester. I learned very quickly that this was an extremely important game for Europeans. Since it wouldn’t actually be airing until 5:00 am New Zealand time the following day, Oliver & Ross made an ingenious plan to stay awake through the entire evening all the way through to the next morning in order to watch the game. So, we had some time to kill before 5:00 am came around. To start, we all crawled back through the window to go inside and hang out in the kitchen. There, we met up with Hisashi & Shinya, as well as about 7 others from Japan. Our evening in the kitchen consisted of loud music, dancing (mostly on the part of Ross & Nicolas), birthday shenanigans for Oliver at midnight, fun group photos, and Francois lifting one of the smaller Japanese girls above his head as though she was a small dumbbell.

I laughed soo much throughout the evening, which in turn just made me cough more and more. In fact, I laughed/coughed so hard and to such an extent that I either tore the cartilage between a couple of my ribs or bruised one of them—painful, quite painful. Still, I wasn’t going to let that damper my fun. Later in the night, a group of us decided to walk to one of the nearby Irish pubs, Father Ted’s. Sooo much fun! The pub had a really great live band that played until around 1:00 am, then the place turned into a proper dance club environment after the band went offstage. I danced right alongside my hostel group (which I later paid for in pain), but I must admit that my energy was no match for my Japanese counterparts! They rocked it out! =) I left the pub around 4:00 am, stayed up chatting with Ross and some of the others in the kitchen until just before 5:00 am, then was off to bed. I woke up about 4 hours later to check out of the hostel. As I was on my way out of the dorm room, I passed by a verrry weary Ross & Oliver. They had just finished watching the big Barcelona vs. Manchester game & were finally going to bed---at 9:00 am! Haha. Troopers!

Cheers, Ash