Day 15
Thursday December 16
Maja:
Thank you Plus Hostel Berlin. You’ve been great. I wish you’dn’t have had to shut your doors. Now we’re going to have to leave this awesome start to our journey and find somewhere else to call home.
Mark:
We’ve booked our next hostel, Industriepalast – that’s Industriepalast – for two nights with the view to staying for the duration if we like it. Before then, we take our time getting ourselves together and leaving today. Check in for our next place isn’t until 2pm and checkout at Plus is 11am. But with it being the last day of school, as long as there are employees in the building, no-one really cares what time we leave. We make it out a little after 12pm and the guy at reception tells us we are the last guests in the building. The last guests ever to be at Plus Hostel, Berlin. The place Maja has found is right across the road which is a little more of a trek than it sounds, but still. It isn’t far. So we do it all on foot in two trips. Arriving there, we tell the receptionist that we know check in isn’t until 2, but we had to be out of our last place by now, so could we please leave some stuff here and come back later. We’re told yes, and then the guy is stunned at the amount of gear we bring in to be stored in their little lock-up on the ground floor. We leave him to contemplate all that while we head out for another little tourist day to fill the time between now and check-in. Destination for today: Alexanderplatz. This is the central zone of old East Berlin and home to Berlin’s TV tower and it’s a good solid walk away.
This walk takes us right along the almost mile long section of Berlin wall from the East Side Gallery, stopping for the first time to actually take some pictures of ourselves here. Yes, we are in full tourist mode. We reach Alexanderplatz and just have a general walk around, surprised that there really isn’t a great deal to actually see here but it’s still cool to have made it to the base of the tower we’ve been looking over at for the past two weeks. A wander round the area for a while, stopping for lunch in a sushi restaurant and it’s time to make it back to check in for real. We return on one of the spectacular train routes that cross all over the city like a kind of inverse tube system. Here, it’s all above ground so that as you walk around the place, trains are constantly rushing over your head, or high to the side of you around 20 feet up. Now we’re riding one of those trains and taking in the full panoramic city view they always provide. We arrive at the hostel around 5pm, reclaim all our stuff and take it up to the room we’ve been assigned and choose our own beds – mine on one side of the room and Maja’s on the other. On a chair next to her bed, Maja’s finds a suitcase which she casually picks up and moves next to the one other bed in here that someone has already claimed. OK. So we have a room mate. Cool. There could be more to come as this is a six-bed room with three others yet to be spoken for.
But we don’t think any more about that. Today has taken it out of us again and, on our respective beds, fully clothed and on top of the covers, we both soon fall deep asleep. A half hour or an hour or so later I’m woken by the door opening to our room. I’m on the right hand side of the room looking down a small corridor towards the outer door. Inside this corridor to the left from where I’m looking is the bathroom. Into the room now comes our new roommate and would-be companion. That’s how it works in hostels, right? Everyone’s sharing bedrooms and kitchens and toilets and showers. People are on their own or in groups and most of them are on holiday or at least in some kind of holiday mode. Whatever their reasons for being here, it is by definition a shared, communal environment and everyone gets along to get along, occasionally on the way meeting people who become good friends. At the very least, you generally go for a friendly disposition and more or less expect something from that genre to come back at you. Right? OK. Let’s see how this plays out.
I look up, look down the little corridor at the figure scurrying into the room and, wanting to create something of a welcoming environment for someone entering their previously private room to now find it occupied, take the initiative and say hello. I not only get no reply, but this person glares at me with deep malevolence and silently continues down the corridor. ‘Oh,’ I think, slightly taken aback. If she’s not happy at me being here, wait till she sees the other bed. She’s fully in the room now and Maja’s also awake. ‘Hello,’ Maja offers. Again, silence. This person seems to have come in here under the impression we’ve broken into her very own private house and are sleeping on her couch having helped ourselves to her leftovers from last night, possibly kicking her dog while we were at it. Look missy, this is a shared room containing six beds. Or did you not quite get the concept when you booked in? ‘Don’t you speak?’ I ask at some attempt to break what is strangely starting to look like tension around here. ‘I have a zoom meeting,’ she barks out into the air at something or someone out there. Fine. ‘And where’s my bag?’ she snaps sharply. Maja points next to this girl’s bed and without acknowledgement she goes and picks it up and puts it somewhere else.
Did she say she has a zoom meeting? In here? In a six bed room in a hostel? I do hope she’s not expecting us to sit or lie here in silence while she conducts that. Or at least, if she did have that hope, it may well have been accommodated with just the slightest of courtesies anyone should be able to expect in this kind of setting. But no. Sorry. She’s just been plain rude and ignorant. Actually, try downright hostile. So when she does actually begin a call for which she clearly expects silence to be observed from her underlings, minions and general inferiors in life, I go across to lie down with Maja and the two of us begin to talk. Not loudly or overtly, just normal bedroom level that we somehow deem ourselves the right to have. We really haven’t read the rules or received the memo. Charm girl makes a big show of telling her zoom contact she has to go somewhere else, loudly packs up her computer and, in something of a pique, huffs out of the room, leaving me and Maja breathless with a mixture of laughter and total confusion. We stay there for another half hour or so until the door opens again, our new best friend walks in, sees us there, glares in full, eviscerating disapproval and turns and storms back out again.
She’s back around five minutes later, this time accompanied by a friend and the pair of them start gathering all her things. This ‘friend’ is actually an employee of this place but I don’t discover that until later. I make the clearly stupid mistake of trying to say hi to him and get the same silent treatment she dished out. Not to be intimidated at all, I get up out of bed, dressed only in underpants – yes, very deliberately but I do immediately get dressed in front of the two of them – and I say to him, like I said to her earlier, ‘Do you not talk either?’ He turns to me in with what he hopes is a withering look and snarls, ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’ Whatever. I wonder if all the staff in here are so courteous to guests. Along with Maja I just watch them pack up and leave while the girl says something about having a train to catch. I can’t help myself here and go all faux friendly, wishing her a very happy journey and telling her we will miss her greatly. Oh, if only I could adequately capture in words the gravity of the eye roll this attracts. I’m sure some kind of head muscle must get pulled executing such a manoeuvre. Well, she’s gone now, she ain’t coming back and really, the very best of riddance. What a horrendous person. And what a terrible, unprofessional employee. Unless she told him something about us that really didn’t happen. So, to repeat, what a totally horrendous person it’s just been our misfortune to have to have been put in a room with. Well, she’s gone now to continue to be miserable to herself and inflict that misery on any other unfortunates she happens to encounter today and the rest of forever.
Maja:
I wish I could say that Mark’s account was over the top, that it didn’t happen quite like that, but I can’t. Every single word is true and even expressed quite lightly compared to how it really felt. So I’ll write my account of the situation as well.
Entering the room there were things scattered around everywhere. Wet clothes hanging in the entryway, underwear in the shower, bags and small stuff on every little surface in the room. Clothes on every chair except for the one next to another bed which had a suitcase on it. And of course padlocks on all suitcases and on the locker. Clothes hanging on the rail to her bed meaning no-one could really use the bed under hers. And of course, her things completely dominated the one table in the room. And in we come, with all of our luggage that we’ve struggled to carry all the way up to the room. When we’ve finally got everything in, the only thing I touch of hers is a suitcase on a chair next to the bed I’ve chosen. I move it across the room and put it next to what is clearly her bed. Now I wish I’d taken all of her stuff and put it on her bed and poured a bucket of water on it. That would have been appropriate for her level of rudeness and hostility. Maybe.
Well, I can understand that during covid she might not have been expecting company in the room, so I was very respectful moving about in the area. Not that I did much, because both me and Mark immediately fell asleep of exhaustion after moving in our luggage. Then when she comes back I wake up to the sound of the door and Mark saying hello. She takes a couple of steps into the room and I say hello. I mean, it’s a new roommate, let’s be friendly. But I am met by the most horrifying stare of my life. She looks at me with such vile disgust that you would have thought I’d killed her cat. They are eyes of pure hatred. I am completely taken aback. It feels awful. Her first words come out in a forced, spiteful, accusatory bark. ‘Where’s my bag?’ I point to her bed where it is clearly visible. If she’d not stopped to be rude she would have walked right into it. She then sits at the table, takes out her computer and announces that she has a zoom meeting. Oh, OK. What kind of strange behaviour is this?
Why would you check into a six bed dorm room expecting to be alone? Why do you think that this is your office? How can you hate someone just for being allocated the same room as you? How can you now expect me to respect your meeting when you treated me with hatred? When I was asleep in MY BED?
I have no idea what this woman thinks when Mark comes into my bed a little while later and we talk to each other for two reasons. One, to simply annoy her if we’re to be totally honest, and two, to genuinely try to lighten up the terrible mood that she brought into the room. I’m glad we did, because she keeps looking at us like we killed her cats and dogs and everything else that she holds dear. If she knows how to hold things dear, that is. Come on, we’re not even doing anything bad, I think to myself as she keeps making distraught noises. These soon stop as she makes a big show of giving up, tossing her computer back into the bag and storming out of the room.
This makes me and Mark start to giggle. Wow. What a jerk. I’ve never experienced such horrid, completely undeserved behaviour. It actually makes me want to get up. Absolutely shaken, we walk around the room, talking about this horrible experience in disbelief. Well, she’d been doing laundry, and we kinda need to do some as well. So I take a shower and start to hand-wash a couple of our items, hanging them all over the room as she did. Just to annoy her when she comes back. I make sure that we take up just as much space as she did so that it feels a little more fair. It’s not her room to own, and she is not allowed to mess with me. Nah ah ah. No way. I’m getting my revenge by pettiness. I’m doing laundry, which I needed to do anyway. And I’ll move her stuff a little bit to the side to fit ours in. Which is completely normal behaviour I normally wouldn’t think twice about doing, but it is certainly going to tick someone like her completely off. After moving around for a while, I’m starting to feel tired again and fall asleep next to Mark only to wake a little later to a similar experience all over again.
What I hear is the door opening, and then slamming shut but no one enters the room. A couple of minutes later she comes armed with a male companion of sorts. We try to say hello, but are met with absolute silence. This is making us both angry and I can feel a sense of helplessness bubbling up inside of me combined with frustration. Mark approaches and asks the man, ‘Don’t you talk either?’ He abruptly says, ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’ What in the world is happening? How can you behave like this? These people seem sober, and there is literally no explanation for what’s happening. I don’t understand. I feel underdressed and vulnerable without anyone caring about what had happened from my point of view. Once again it happened when I was asleep, and I’m not especially quick up. They soon remove all of her objects with which I am helping and pointing things out and there’s been a word about her catching a train. I wish her a nice trip and am extremely polite. What a ridiculous lie I think as soon as I hear it. Well, OK. What a horrible experience. After they’ve left we’re alone again. Well, at least it’s nice to get rid of her, we agree.
I go to the toilet and realise that the hostel hasn’t even filled up our toilet paper. We’re out and I need to go to the reception to ask for more. When I get to reception, I recognise that very same guy who was in our room just now. I ask him for toilet paper and then I take the opportunity to try to inquire about what just happened. He looks troubled. I tell him that we literally did nothing and that she just came into our room while we were sleeping and was really rude. And then she just moved out. As I ask ‘What happened, what did we do?’ he just looks at me with disgust and says, ‘I’m not supposed to talk about this but that is very different to her story.’ And he gives me a toilet roll and refuses to tell me anything more. What a jerk. It seems like she has made up all kinds of lies to this man about how awful we’ve been, and now he refuses to show any interest in our side of the story. I can’t defend myself. I can’t even get to know what lies she told about us. There is nothing I can do, and it feels awful. I hate this unfriendly place. This is the most unprofessional kind of behaviour being shown by a member of staff of the hostel.
Going back up to Mark, I completely distraughtly tell him what’s just happened, and that I really want to go somewhere else. But at least now we kind of know that no one else is going to come and stay in our room. Why would they put someone in here now after believing whatever horrible things that girl says we did?
