June 23rd; Another early morning since we have to move hostel. Actually, it didn’t have to be. I had my alarm set for eight thirty. Ben, through some wild call of nature, woke up and took a shower at six in the morning. He only realised this once out of the bathroom.
‘Ben,’ I said, ‘you know you are a raging fool?’ I tried to get back to bed but he was very loudly questioning his own actions. ‘Why did I get up at six? I’m a raging fool!’ Still, I stayed in bed until my alarm went off. My general stance on things that morning was ‘hating life.’ It didn’t help when we had to lug our bags to our new hostel in Chelsea or the Lower West Side or wherever it is. It also didn’t help when it turned out be shit.
Tiny tiny rooms with maybe half a metre between beds, nowhere to put bags, a lame common room. The area wasn’t as nice as our last either. Having Central Park next door certainly helps make an area nice. This part of town was kind of dirty and plain, with lots of nutcases around. I’m sure the arrival or our group did nothing to help that ratio. We dropped our bags and went for a walk around.
Kate and I ended up in a Carribean BBQ shop planning our next few days. It involved lots of brochures and web searching. I found a wicked three day tour. There are tons of English-only tours that cost about five hundred bucks, but if you look you can find bilingual Chinese/English tours for less than one hundred and fifty. You have to pay for food and maybe another fifty for entry to all the places, but it’s much better. This one was Washington DC, Niagara Falls and One Thousand Islands. I’m not sure what the last one is, but I have a feeling the sauce may be named after it. If that turns out to be true, I have high expectations.
We went for a walk and grabbed tickets for a show later tonight. Spring Awakening, since it had won seven or eight Tony Awards. All we could really draw from the show was that those awards must have been for things like ‘Most Awkward Moment’, ‘Most Disturbed and Crazy Ass Main Female Lead’ and perhaps ‘Most Punk Characters in 1890s German School-Set Musical’. It wasn’t a bad show, but Rent kicked its arse.
The story was something along the lines of a bunch of kids trying to discover themselves and their sexuality in an 1890s strict German school environment. I didn’t particularly like any of the characters. Then the music didn’t gel with me. They spoke with mild German accents until they pulled the microphones out of their jackets. At that point it changed to pop-punk anthems with a bratty Californian accent. Didn’t mix. Made me put on a confused face when it first happened. Some of the songs were good but then the awkward stuff started coming out.
I don’t know how old these kids were supposed to be, but it must have been awkward to sing a song whilst pleasuring yourself under your night gown. Oh, and then that girl asked the pretentious male lead to whip her, at which point he did and then got carried away and then ran away crying. And then later he got his pants off on stage. And then he ended up in prison for something. I don’t know. It just didn’t make all the sense in the world. Still, I enjoyed it.
We headed back to the hostel. The boys were out shopping so we sat on the stairs eating icecream and talking until they came back. That’s the other bad thing about our hostel; the common room closes at eleven, and people go to bed and everything. And they must have overbooked our room, or someone had stolen a key or something, because an hour after falling asleep I was woken up by someone saying I was in their bed. It was covered in bags, but I ignored them. Too tired to do anything, I sort of slumped on the floor with my jumper as my pillow. The guy in the bed next to me offered me his quilt since it was too hot to sleep with it. I could tell by the way he offered that he was one who had done his fair share of floor-sleeping the past. We’re a sympathetic bunch. I humbly refused.
In the morning he woke me up again and gave me the bed since he was leaving for the day. I would have given him a chocolate bar or something had he come back that night.
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