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Published: December 28th 2006
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For the better part of the past few weeks, while anyone with a shred of common sense was booking their rooms for the holidays, I’d been merrily traipsing through Morocco’s medinas and stuffing myself with
tajine and generally operating under the time-tested assumption that things just always work out in the end. To a certain degree, that old adage is holding true: though the next week involves four different hotels, though I’ll be paying $150 for a room on the night of the 30th, things are - seen in a certain light - working out in the end.
I’ve moved from a handsome, cozy
hostal just off of Las Ramblas to a busy hostel a few blocks away, a down-grade in my living situation that goes far beyond a simple vowel change. I’m tucked into a room that has the light, breezy air of the Middle Passage, touching toes with a Brazilian guy who all but makes a death rattle in his sleep. Things only go downhill after the first turbulent night. My nemesis arrives in the form of a perky Canadian named Diana - a tall, slender chatterbox with purple streaks in her hair and a penchant
for packing and unpacking her bags at three in the morning. In her own way, I’m sure she’s an absolute peach - her ills nothing a couple of kicks to the larynx couldn’t cure. But in spite of her best efforts, I’ll allow nothing more than a few cool, even words to pass between us, our friendship not likely to progress beyond the stage of cordialities.
Elsewhere the typical melodramas of hostel life are playing out. The squeals of fumbling teenage sex ring out in the hallway. Things are burning on the stove. The common room has become the staging ground for a veritable LeCarré’s novel worth of international intrigues. The garrulous Spaniards have taken in a rogue Australian; the South Koreans are staking out a corner couch; a lone Israeli wanders from the periphery of one conversation to the next, like an all-too-obvious punchline to a bad Woody Allen skit. In the middle of it all is a certain American - struggling to find the much-touted WiFi signal, making ample use of the bottomless coffee - keeping to himself in a way that’s surely convinced some in the room that no matter the context, America just has
to go it alone.
While I’m typing away a young Norwegian comes over to join me - a tall, handsome kid with eyes that suggest depths of irony I couldn’t reach with a submarine. He tells me about his own blog - kept anonymously, for reasons to which he cryptically alludes with his eyebrows - and about the cheap tactics he’s resorted to in the past to boost traffic. At the prodding of a friend he inserted tawdry stock phrases into the text - an easy way to dupe people into clicking on his link when it came up on some X-rated Google search. For all its ingenuity, I can’t imagine doing the same for the humble blog you have before you. I suspect my readers have come to expect a certain ethical standard here, and that while other bloggers might refer to “nude celebrity photos” or “upskirt Britney Spears pics,” I prefer to take the moral high road.
No, friends, you won’t catch me going on and on about “naked cheerleaders,” “nude co-eds” or “Japanese schoolgirls.” And any mention you see of “hot girl-on-girl action” is purely incidental.
Though I expected my first
full-fledged
CouchSurfing meet to proceed along similarly debased lines, the night itself proves to be remarkably chaste - a natural by-product, perhaps, of the 8:1 guy-girl ratio. Still, we’ve managed to occupy a broad swath of a bar’s
terazza in the Plaça Reial - chasing out the locals, exhausting the waitstaff, and generally proving to be the sort of nuisance you’d expect from 40 out-of-towners. It’s a tiring meet-and-greet; you can only answer questions like “Where are you from?” and “Where are you going?” so many times before an otherwise innocuous party begins to feel like a border crossing.
But as the group and the noise level continue to grow, the place takes on the manic energy of a massive jam session, with more and more people showing up, grabbing a seat, and adding their voices to the chorus. There are chatty Catalonians and awkward Malaysians and a quiet German kid who keeps looking up hopefully from his beer. There’s a rowdy group of college kids from Texas and a mild-mannered, sweet-faced Midwesterner in a purple velour sportcoat, who does circuits around the table and works the crowd like he owns the place. There’s a pretty young blond from
Latvia that everyone’s trying to make time with. When she stands the shirt rides up her smooth, flat stomach; her dimples are deep enough to collect pools of rainwater for the birds to drink.
When the bill’s settled we rumble across the plaza to a nearby nightclub. All night we’re connecting faces with blurry snapshots from the CouchSurfing site - the kid who was cycling through the Pyrenees; the girl on a beach in Croatia - some of us forming the brief, fleeting bonds of people who, on second glance, might’ve preferred certain profiles to the real thing. It’s after three when we begin to stumble out, into the crisp air of early winter. There are people congregating around the fountain and milling in the plaza’s long arcades; someone’s trying to organize another gathering for the following night, offering promises to post a thread on the website. Everything’s just coming up rosy, in the end. Before we go our separate ways I get my best piece of news, finding a host for three nights around the 1st, and saving myself a couple of hundred bucks that, I’m sure, will spend themselves without too much complaint.
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