speaking of hostels, i had a little roommate situation that could be construed as funny.....although at the time, was anything but.
in yangshuo, we stayed in the "showbiz inn" which sleeps six people per room. i guess for every three roommates, your bound to get one weird roommate. enter creepy australian fellow. atleast sixty years old. eager to socialize with the rest of the twenty something year olds who populate yangshuo. he kept asking me where i was going and who i was going with and what there was to do around town. yes, i was a little creeped out by him and when you're traveling with one other girl, you can't be too safe. i was a bit elusive and when i returned later that day, found him playing pool by himself on the roof. a little bit later, he was trying to talk to some women in the lobby. later, reading a book by himself in the bed. who does he remind me of? i kept thinking about it all day long and it didn't occur to me until a few days later that he is dell griffith from trains, planes, and automobiles! you know, traveling alone, he just wants to find a friend, but he's just kind of a burden and he knows it. no one really wanted to do anything with him. i felt kind of bad for him, but that didn't stop me from waiting in the lobby for the rest of my roommates to turn in for the night. you know the age-old saying, "we girls gotta stick together when there are weird, too-much-leg-baring, teva-and-socks-wearing old men in the bed right next to mine." one night, kindra was asleep, the other roommates were partying the night away, and i was CLEARLY, VISIBLY awake and reading in my bed. maybe he forgot there was a bathroom in the room, maybe he was too lazy to make the effort to change there, but all of a sudden, his pants were off, showing me more old man, white australian bum than i'd bargained for.
alright. any chance of me inviting him on a bike ride went down the drain. i suddenly longed to be in a flaming car with original dell than in this too small room with naked phony dell.
another character worth mentioning is my "sleeping tiger" friend. we hiked this hill called "moon hill", which is less of a hike and more of a climb up 800 steep steps. at the bottom of our hike was this old woman, for sure somewhere in her eighties and probably half my height and weight. she asked if we would buy her water and upon hearing "no, i have some, thanks", she brought out a winnie the pooh fan, pointed to the top, said "go!", and followed us the whole way up. every time we stopped to catch our breath (which was pretty often), she would pounce on us with the fan and fan us till we were ready to go. she would also point to my mosquito bites and say "MOS-EE-QUITO! no good...no good!" i think she must have been bitten by a radioactive spider to give her superhuman endurance because she could have run up and down those stupid steps five times before i could make it up once. crazy lady. well, of course, at the top, i had to buy a bunch of her overpriced water. oh yeah, the reason i call her my "sleeping tiger" friend is that she kept pointing to this mountain saying "sleeping tiger" while pretending she was sleeping and then popping her eyes open and saying "RAWR!" while turning her fingers into claws. i'll miss you, crazy superhuman grandma.
i have to say that i could not have been more welcomed back into the states by anything more than TOY STORY 3. so good! maybe my favorite of the trilogy. there was not a minute where i was not laughing hysterically. best characters....barbie and ken. by far. pixar has outdone themselves again. geniuses. i want to send those people a bouquet of roses.
i bought the whole series of "lost" for under $30 in china and my siblings and i are on a "lost" binge, so i gotta go. what's that? hermit on a friday night? can't talk. have to go help desmond save the world. DESMOND!! AHH!!
