Cheese Eating Surrender Wombat

After a hectic flight itinerary that involved a 24 hour layover in New York (and about 16 hours of the serious drinking mix with Charles as a result), a classic 8am Guinness at Dublin airport, another flight that was strangely overpopulated by Poles (judging by their homemade onion salads and aggressive attempts to all pile off the plane at the same time) and a half hour train ride past cows and flatness, I arrived at Den Haag Holland Spoor Station.

What a ghetto.  I headed for the hostel tout de suite, only to find that it was simply a ghetto with a roof.  The place smelled like a nursing home.  There were a bunch of young ferals from Germany getting naked in the half-sun on the patio outside.  I decided to embrace the rankness and paid my 110 euros for four nights’accomodation (a precaution in case I couldn’t find an apartment quickly).

I walked into the room to the glorious sounds and odours of somebody totally obliterating the bathroom.  The joys of the youth hostel, I thought.  Two spanish guys with greasy hair and homoerotic magazines lazed on their beds.

“Hola.”

Presently, the bathroom destroyer appeared.  He was anything but youthful.  At least 60, in my estimation.

“From where are you?” he asked, in Borat english.

“Australia.  How about you?”

“Not Australia.”  That was it.

My first thought was that this guy could only be one of three things.  He might be a vagrant. He might be a fugitive.  Or, worst of all, he could be a raging kiddiebutthunter trawling for action at a youth hostel.

I didn’t press the question.  I set to unpacking and he slinked over to his bed and flopped heavily onto it.  He looked up at the underside of the top bunk indifferently, and then with great concentration and an outrageous lack of concern for the others in the room, let out a big, wet, extremely audible fart, reclining his legs a bit and exhaling with extreme satisfaction.  He then rolled languidly onto his side and fell asleep, just like that.

Stunned, I spent a minute or two studying the horrendous beast that had infiltrated the room.  He had a head like a big brown lump of wet clay and a nose that resembled a beaten up old pipe.  He had piggish eyes that were certainly too close together, but were probably useful for peering into enclosed spaces (such as rubbish bins).

The most striking aspect of the man, undoubtedly, was the vile stench which emanated from every single pore on his manky, sunburned body.  I’ve met some blokes that aren’t really into showering, but this fellow embraced a whole new level of pungent seediness.  He was a walking colonic irrigation gone horribly wrong.  A petri-dish of all things foul. He wore his stench like a big overcoat:  It was all-encompassing.

Pong-tastic stuff.

It was so bad, in fact, that I during our brief conversation, I convinced myself that I had crawled inside an elephant’s arsehole and inhaled deeply.

I am a person who holds deep respect for anyone that does their ‘thing’ well.  Some people are fantastic at, say, painting.  Other people are famed for their amazing driving skills.  Others are even renowned for not being particularly good at anything.  (I don’t really have any respect for the last group.)

I have to be truthful with you; I felt a certain level of respect for this crazy mediterranean guy with intolerable body odour.  I doubt I could live with myself, sitting in a puddle of personal poosmells all day, but clearly the gentleman was fairly accustomed to his dreadful aroma.  I’m really not exaggerating: every time the fellow moved, his body released a new and fruity stink, allowing those in the room to sample a new and pungent ”flavour” every few minutes.  The rancid odours poured out every conceivable orifice, like sounds from a pipe organ.  It was random, obnoxious, and in a bizarre way, brilliant.  It coated the back of my mouth and made me want to spew.  Can you taste it?  I hope not.

I’m going to call him Emre.  I was told by an equally frightened traveller that he was Turkish.  Ex-army, he’d heard.  Dangerous.  Ate cats.  I thought that was a load of shit.

Also occupying my room were, as I previously mentioned, two spanish greaseballs who tried to take their mind off the smell by reading homoerotic magazines.  I’m sorry, but putting a semi naked girl on the cover does not alter the fact that behind her are 80 pages of Yves Saint Laurent ads featuring topless men with big pectorals.  They spoke spanish and didn’t want to be spoken to.  That would have been fine, but with the cat-eating, ex-Turkish army smellogram Emre in the bunk next to mine, I felt like I needed an ally or two.  At the pub downstairs I befriended this random dutch guy from Utrecht, bonding on stories of how wierd Emre was, and how he might be fugitive, and that he stank like a massive heap of shit.  Coincidentally, he was in the bunk immediately below me.  I don’t remember his name.  Let’s go with Ruud.  That’s a good dutch name.  I figured by the look of his wierd “dutch haircut” (I’ll explain another time) that he wasn’t Turkish.

The friendship soured somewhere around 2am, when Ruud began snoring in a particularly quirky (Dutch) fashion.  I’ve stayed in rooms sleeping in excess of 30 people and can handle a rhythmic snorer, and even the occasional mumbled sleeptalk.   Unfortunately, Ruud’s eine kleine nachtmusik was a combination of spastic choking sounds, gurgling, and aggressive sleeptalk, punctuated with scattergun SNORT sounds.  Every now and then Ruud would get a rhythm going and I was able to tune him out.  Then there’d come a loud SNORT, more gurgling, more talking, and spastic noises.

Goddamn Ruud.  That disgusting unit.  Never trust the dutch.

So I’m sure you can imagine the scene.  I’m lying there in this rank, fleabitten hostel bed, swimming in a bog of eternal stench, enjoying the sounds of the retarded dutch wildlife convention.  It was giving me the royal shits.  I had bought a bottle of pepsi and I lay there, eyeing it on top of the cupboard, debating whether to take a little caffeine hit and go for a walk, or to try and get to sleep (against all odds).  I started to doze a bit. Then the pepsi bottle moved.

I thought that maybe I was dreaming, so I lay there still.  Then I heard a loud slurping sound, followed by the sound of a plastic lid being replaced, and a breathy burp.  Then the pepsi bottle was replaced, softly and deliberately, and turned carefully so that the label was in the exact same place it had always been.

I sat up and copped a whiff.  Right there, standing right by my bunk, was Emre, looking a bit sheepish.  I scowled at him and he scuttled away.  To be honest, I was pretty taken aback.  Granted, it was just a pepsi, but there’s an unspoken rule that one doesn’t touch another’s stuff in hostels.  Ever.

The whole thing made me feel a bit uneasy.  I lay back down, swore loudly to express my distaste and shut my eyes.

It didn’t matter how much I tried to take my mind off it, I just could not sleep.  I lay there in the dark for (what seemed) an age, listening to Miles Davis through my headphones.  I turned over and faced the wall and must have stayed there, half dosing, for at least an hour.  The album came to an end and I took my earphones out.

I smelt him before I saw him, but I instantly knew what he was doing.  There, in the dark, that crazy Turkish bastard was rifling through my baggage.

I sat up, furious, and bellowed at him.  “Hey!! What in Christ’s name are you doing?”

I think I scared the shit out of him because he bailed out immediately, charging into the toilet and slamming the door.

Ten minutes later, and after flushing the toilet an obscene number of times (I didn’t think I’d scared him that much, but I guess I really did) he walked out sheepishly.  I imagine he was hoping in his rusty, kleptomanic head that I had fallen asleep.  Not likely.  It was 4am, and I was in a foul, foul mood.  I gave him mouthful of expletives and pointed the contaminated pepsi bottle at him.  “See this,” I said, “you smelly piece of shit? if you touch my stuff one more time, I will ram this up your arsehole. Get it?”

Emre grunted and climbed back into bed.  Who knows whether he’d understood me fully, but the message was clear. Ruud, despite the calamity, had continued to snore as ruthlessly as Hitler.  I had had enough.  I climbed down from the bunk, flipped the smelly turk the bird (just in case) and busted out into the quiet dawn.  I had enormous motivation to find an apartment, despite a complete lack of sleep.  For four hours before the businessmen started work I visited the windows of real estate agents in non-ghetto neighbourhoods until I found something that appealed.  By 10am, I had secured a place and was ready to roll out of the rank hostel.

“Oh, I am so so sorry – we don’t give refunds” said the feral behind the desk, feigning sympathy.

No matter, I was out.  Not being able to move into my new place for 24 hours,  I checked into a marginally more expensive hotel and enjoyed a 2 x 3m broom closet for the night.  But there were no smelly turkish men going through my stuff.  I even checked the wardrobe.

It only gets better from here.  More human experiences to come shortly!

Love,

Wombat