I forgot something slightly amusing from my recap from Wales.
When we got to our hostel, I talked to this great guy from Tokyo for a while. He was really funny and he spoke English well. He said that he was in the UK on business, and that he managed a Japanese musician. From that, I made a few assumptions. First, I assumed that any other Japanese guys in our room would be the musician this guy referenced. Second, I assumed that any other Japanese guys would be cool, much like this guy.
When this guy and I are done talking, I decide to pick a bed for myself. This room that he and I were in had maybe 5 or 6 sets of bunk beds. Laura takes the bed under the guy I talked to, and I take a bed across the room because underneath it, there's a lot of Japanese stuff. At that point, I'm thinking, "Ha ha, I'll bunk up with the cool musician and I won't have to deal with any weirdos here."
That night, we head back up to the room. I see that the bed under me contains a sleeping Japanese dude, ostensibly the musician. I figure that in the morning, I'll talk to the guy some and it'll make this arrangement a little less awkward.
In the middle of the night, choked, guttural screams wake me up. I decide that someone in the room is having a nightmare, and that they'll soon get over it. This doesn't happen. We keep getting these periodic screams, puncuated by a few sentences of Japanese. After a few of these, I realize that it's coming from the bed beneath me. This super cool musician guy is having full-on night terrors.
The next morning, Laura and I are talking.
She says, "Wasn't last night embarrassing?"
I say, "You mean all of the noise?"
She says, "Yeah, I couldn't believe you were carrying on like that."
She thought that I was the one going crazy in my life. Somehow, in two years of sharing a bedroom, she missed the fact that, in the middle of the night, I like to scream in Japanese and shake the furniture.
I say, "That wasn't me! That was the guy underneath me!"
She says, "Well, it sounded like you."
Later that night we're at the bar, and over in the corner, I see the guy from the bed below. I still believe that he is the cool musician, he simply had a bad night, and that I might want to meet him still. From across the room, I can tell he's looking at a Word doc on his laptop. There are no pictures or paragraphs, it's just line after line of text.
I check on him every once in a while over the next four or five hours. Not only does he look at the same Word doc the whole time, he never moves. He never orders a beverage, he never talks to anyone, he never even goes to the bathroom. If this guy is the cool Japanese musician, he's incredibly intense.
We get back up to our room later and I discover that the original guy, the one that I talked to and unknowingly convinced me to share bunk beds with his musician friend, had checked out. However, the other Japanese guy, the one underneath my bed, was still there. Thus, the guy below was not the cool musician at all; he was just some crazy Japanese guy who stares at his laptop for hours at a time and goes bitchcakes in his sleep.
At this point, it was too late to change beds. He and I shared bunks again, and again, he went crazy. This time, knowing he was a little weird, I began to fear that he would stuff my mouth with socks and climb into bed with me. Thankfully, all he did was scream and flop around. Laura still thought it was me.
Posted by Cody at August 15, 2007 9:00 PM