Rainy days

(ignore the underlined words, no idea what happened)

It´s been raining steadily for a few days here, which has given me the ideal excuse for just hanging around in the hostel chatting, playing cards, losing at chess and drinking the free coffee.

This place is quite notorious for trapping people for weeks or months at a time. In the visitors´ book there are entries from people who came here for a couple of days but ended up staying for six months.

There are some interesting people here. I think I have already mentioned the Chech bloke called Andre. He was a strange sort, and, it seems, a thief without scruples. I´d found him quite amusing company, because of his endless monologues about chasing women in South America. His tales were made more interesting, to me at least, because he had tiuret´s syndrome and said "hrumph, hrumph" all the time. One typical story ended thus: "It was hrumph, hrumph, like making love to Kojak. And then she hrumph, hrumph, started vomiting hairballs, like a hrumph, hrumph, cat." Most of his tales involved the various ways he´d met women across the continent, usually involving the payment of cash. One story that bears repeating involved him in pursuit of a girl for more noble ends. He said that he´d met a Chech couple in Mexico who were searching the continent for their daughter, who had gone missing in Bolivia six years before. Apparently she´d just got off the bus to have a wee and was never seen again. Andre said that he travelled to Bolivia and found her in a village brothel where she´d been kept as a drug-addicted sex slave and baby factory. Apparently it´s a well-known case. He didn´t mention how long he spent with her at the brothel before he alerted her parents. . .

Andre left unexpectedly in the middle of the night on Friday, without paying his bill here. A few hours later a guest discovered that his locker had been forced open and $800 dollars stolen. The real shame is that the guest is a really sweet Ethiopian bloke who came here to meet the Eritreans (who left, strangely, shortly after he arrived). The cash represents his total funds, and is not insured. On top of this his visa runs our tomorrow and he´s got no money to replace it. I think the hostel owner, a very decent bloke, is helping him out.

Another entertaining chap is Aiden, who works as a master stonemason on Hereford Cathedral. He tells me that somewhere on the tower, about half way up and not visible from the ground, is a gigantic sandstone cock and balls that was installed by one of his colleagues six months ago. I wonder what the bishop would think?