England Can Be Wicked Weird

It’s come to my attention that I am very, very bad at updating my blog in a timely manner. (See: literally every blog post because they all come at least two months after the trip they’re about.) So for that reason I’m going to mix things up. I have been trying to write my blog posts in order but it’s become overwhelming so I’ve decided to work my way backwards instead and hopefully I’ll get caught up and stay on top of things simultaneously.

This past weekend I took a trip to London and it was a weird weekend. I stayed at a hostel called Safestay London Elephant & Hostel and I just want to give all you ladies out there a warning: don’t stay here. Calling this place “Safestay” is a pretty hilarious joke.

When I checked into my room, I met the man who had the bed beneath mine. He was from Ghana and must’ve been in his mid-30s. We introduced ourselves and went through the typical hostel getting-to-know-you conversation, which consisted of questions like “where are you from?” and “what are you doing in London?” He asked me to sit with him on his bed and I didn’t want to seem rude, so I sat on the edge while we talked.

When I got tired I told him I was going to bed, he was quiet for a few minutes and then, from the darkness of the room, I heard him say, “You disappoint me.”

“What?” I asked.

“I thought we were going to have a conversation and you went to bed.”

“I’m tired,” I told him.

“I’m tired, too,” he said, “but I thought we had a connection. I thought we were going to spend the night together.”

At first this man had seemed like an unassuming stranger, a little annoying but nice. In that moment, though, I realized he was a total creep. I told him I was going to sleep and silently decided to switch rooms in the morning.

The room was silent for a few minutes, interrupted only by the uneven snoring coming from the other people in the room. I shifted in my bed, trying to get comfortable, and the guy below me asked if I was okay. I pretended I had headphones in and didn’t hear him. He knocked on the bottom of my bed until I finally responded to him. I told him I wasn’t in the mood to talk and he finally shut up.

I still wasn’t able to sleep because of all the snoring and kept tossing and turning. After about an hour of this, the guy beneath me asked again if I was okay. He had the light in his bed turned on and it was shining up the wall, right into my eyes, and it was one of the things keeping me awake so I politely asked him to turn it off. To this he responded by grumbling about how he couldn’t turn it off because he was scared of the dark. Eventually he did, though, and kept saying to himself over and over how scared he was. Finally he stopped talking and I assumed he went to sleep.

But then, a few minutes later, he said, “If you can’t sleep and I can’t sleep, you should just come down here so we can sleep together.”

That was the last straw for me. I climbed down from my bed and announced I was switching rooms. The man watched me pack up my stuff for a few minutes before leaving the room. Stupidly, I assumed he was going to the bathroom. It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that it occurred to me he was probably going to be at reception when I arrived there.

And, lo and behold, there he was, already telling the guy at reception all about the crazy girl in his room who was overreacting. When I was finally able to tell my side of the story, the man at reception told me that because I had sat on the edge of his bed earlier in the evening, the guy in my room wasn’t in the wrong to expect me to sleep with him that night. (I feel like it’s important to point out the irony in this situation: this was all happening on International Women’s Day.)

At that point I no longer felt safe staying in the building at all. Another room wasn’t going to cut it. I needed another place to stay. And that was how I ended up homeless on the streets of London, carrying all my bags, at 5am.

I walked into the first hotel I passed, spent an obscene amount of money, and slept for a few hours.

I want to take this opportunity to give a little disclaimer about hostel-ing. I posted this whole incident in my instagram story and received a message from a girl who changed her hostel booking to an all-female room after seeing what happened to me. I think it’s so important to know that for every creep you meet in a hostel, there’s thousands of other guys who are perfectly respectful. For instance, my last two nights in London I spent as the only female in a mixed dorm and the guys I shared the room with were awesome and I never felt uncomfortable for a second.

The next morning I met up with my my friend, Eliza. (Eliza is from New Zealand, living in London, and we met at a hostel in Krakow. Usually hostel life is amazing. Insert eye roll emoji here.)

Eliza and I spent most of our time together eating and drinking, but really once you’ve seen all the major touristy stuff in London (like I did last time) you never really need to do it again. (Except I definitely plan to come back in four years when Big Ben isn’t covered in scaffolding.)

After my three nights in London I met up with my friend, Sierra, a girl I know from Rhode Island, and we drove to Glastonbury with a pit stop at Stonehenge.

Since seeing Stonehenge, people have been constantly asking me how it was, to which I respond with, “It’s a pile of rocks.” To be fair, that is the truth, but for the most part I’m kidding. It really was pretty cool to stand there and see one of the oldest structures left standing, something that is a giant mystery to the world. My theory: aliens. I actually asked one of the security guys if he thought it was aliens and he said “there’s nothing to say it isn’t” so I took that as a government-approved “yes.”

Attempting to get a #barebackandbeyond photo on Glastonbury's main street.

From Stonehenge we went to Glastonbury, where we’d be staying for the night. Most people know Glastonbury because of the festivals but without any festivals happening it’s just another piece of small town England. Except even on a normal day, it’s a weird fucking place. The people are generally really nice. Like too nice. Like Stepford Wife-type nice. I didn’t trust it at all. The only part that made me feel a bit more comfortable about how robot-like everyone acted was seeing a few glimpses of Glastonbury’s shady underbelly. While walking down the town’s main street, we witnessed three different fights. Shopkeepers poked their heads out of the stores, smiling along, saying this happened all the time.

The first fight was between two men, one with his pants falling so far down his hips that when he came up to us to say hello, we could see full bush. The guy he was fighting turned a corner and when we passed the turn, I saw him making out with some girl against the wall. Twenty minutes later, when we walked back in the other direction, we saw the couple fighting and watched as the guy hit his girlfriend. Wanting to help but not wanting to risk escalating the situation, Sierra and I watched from across the street as two other drunk guys tackled this guy while his girlfriend sat on the side of the road, crying.

We would have stuck around to keep watching if we weren’t in a rush to hike up to the Glastonbury Tor before getting back on the road to make it to London in time for our flight.

Unfortunately we hit a lot of traffic on the way and had to deal with a corrupt car rental agency (tip: never rent from Easirent Cars) and ended up missing our flight, getting stuck in the airport overnight. Every time we tried to fall asleep, someone came over and told us we couldn’t sleep because it wasn’t a hotel. Had I known that at 7pm when we first arrived, I would have gotten an actual hotel, but we didn’t find out we weren’t allowed to sleep there until only five hours before we had to be back at the airport for our flight so it simply wasn’t worth the money.

Eventually I made it back to Dublin, insanely sleep deprived but happy for the weekend to be over so I could finally get in bed and sleep for a year. (Except just kidding because I actually had to go straight to school. Slept for 14 hours that night though!)