Day 3 was Christmas Eve. I honestly have no clue what I did all that day, or the next for that matter. All I know is that on my camera I have these sweet pictures of paella. It was about $2.50 for a plate, and a chef came into the hostel and made it there in the kitchen for us. It was pretty good. I wouldn't say it was amazing, but just good.
All I remember about those days is that I kept studying Spanish, and it really started to take off. I would talk with the guys at reception and just chit chat about different stuff, or sometimes I would study my Spanish material I'd brought along.
I'd set up Karaoke Revolution in the main room, and during the afternoons when everyone went out to doing some sightseeing I'd roll down into the main room and just sing my heart out for a good 30 minutes or so. I don't think the guys at reception really enjoyed it, but at least they tolerated it. I also did yoga to keep up with the back pain I was starting to experience from sleeping in the bunk beds.
Guillermo was from Mexico, and he had a pretty decent Mexican accent going on. He's going to school in London for his Ph.D., I think. The thing that struck me about him was that he sat down with me and Charlie when we first met and let us just talk in Spanish with him for about 15 minutes. We butchered the language thoroughly before I finally said, "Ok, I actually feel bad, let's just talk in English now." He was more than willing to talk with us about Spanish and be patient with us as we searched for words, and that's something I usually don't find with other Spanish speakers, so I thought that was really cool.
One of those mornings he went walking with me to find a sports betting house, as I kinda like to throw $10 every now and then on a game. He would do some translating for me; not that I couldn't do it, but it was just better to have him do it since it was kinda complicated to talk about. We got to talking about traveling and views from different countries. He shared that he hated all the hostel small talk that goes on: "Hi, where are you from, how long have you been here, where are you going, etc." I told him that I hated it too, but that it's a necessary evil cause how else are you going to get to the meaty parts of the conversation where you share your life's goals and ideals with someone? It reminded me of when I was in Costa Rica. I would try to go for days without asking someone's name or where they were from, just cause I was so sick of always having the same conversation.
Charlie was pretty cool too. We slept in the same dorm room. It was a 12 bed dorm, and the first couple days I didn't really talk to him even though he was there cause there was just so many people coming and going. Christmas Eve though at around 10 he came over to my bed and said, "Hey, did you see anyone take a laptop?!" Me and him were the only ones in the room since everyone else was out sightseeing, and I kinda opened one eye and was like, "Uh, no, not that I know of." He said he was sorry to wake me up but he was freaking out because he couldn't find his laptop.
It turned out that he'd left it under his bed the night before, and when he woke up that morning it was gone. I kinda thought that maybe the Puerto Rican guy that we'd been hanging out with earlier had taken it, since he was staying in the same room as us and had left that morning. I mean, not that he was a bad guy, but crimes of opportunity seem to be the most common in hostels from what I've seen. Charlie thought it was the cleaning lady but the guys at the reception assured him that there's no way it could be. I mean, it could've been, who knows. I told him that he was welcome to search through my stuff if it would give him any piece of mind and he said that it was fine, he trusted me.
That was the first time we talked, but from then on we hung out for the next several days. In fact, a day or two later I was again trying to fall back asleep cause people kept waking me up at 9am as they'd slam their locker doors, and he came over and said, "Hey, I just saw some guy put a laptop in his locker, and I think it's mine."
We tried to pry the locker open just to peek inside but we couldn't get a good look, so then I convinced him that we should try to pick the lock. He said it was wrong, but I told him that if it's his laptop, it's fine, and if it's not, we'll just put the stuff back and lock it up and no one will be put out. Personally, I've only ever really used the credit card trick on doors and stuff, but I've seen tutorials online of how you can break open a padlock. The ones they used at the hostel were really small and cheap, and I figured "how hard can it be?", so I just convinced him that it could be done. We brainstormed for a while about different materials we could use to pick the lock: I got a soda can and a knife and cut out a piece of metal to try and slide between the catch, but that didn't work. He kept trying things like paper clips, but that didn't work either. After about 20 minutes we gave up, as we were worried that someone might come back in the room and see us breaking into a locker. He went downstairs to get something to drink, and then it dawned on me that maybe I could just jimmy the lock with the knife that I'd taken from the kitchen to cut the soda can up with.
I stuck the knife into the keyhole and applied just a slight bit of pressure and 'voila', the lock popped open. At that point I ran downstairs and quick got Charlie and told him that I'd opened it. He couldn't believe it. We went back inside and I let him open the locker himself. Unfortunately, it wasn't his laptop, but it looked pretty similar. We locked it back up and I put the knife back in the kitchen and we didn't tell anyone else about it.
That night we all decided to go to the club with Jeeyoung and Pureum, so I thought it would be funny if I wore that at the club. We walked around for a while before we found a good club, but when we got there I felt really out of place. The club was playing reggaeton music, and everyone was dancing really dirty. I had just envisioned us going to some kind of techno club where everyone's just kinda dancing by themselves, but reggeaton is 'vulgar', as one of the guys at reception put it. So, after standing around and knowing that I'd feel horrible if I was dancing with some random girl, I just stepped out and went back home.
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