200 Hostels

I wait out my term in the Nunnery (now there’s a sentence I never thought I would write) and the interminable seven further nights drag on, made bearable my numerous trips to the nearby cinema.
During the week, Nicole moves into the room as well, and tries out a number of the spare beds before settling on the remaining bottom bunk. Sam and she try to emulate the one in the bed beneath me (whose name never sunk in) and so, by the end of the week, it looked as though there were three four poster beds in the room with myself sleeping on top of one of them like the intruder they clearly took me for.
Sam turns out to be disappointingly less mysterious than Nameless seems to believe. A gangly English guy with one of those faces which is all cheekbones and collagen, he’s a good looking lad certainly, but his propensity for farting and belching and the evident pride in which he performs such stunts publicly do not strike me as qualifying for an air of mystery. But then what do I know?
As I pack to leave – a task I attempt to perform with such stealth that they might not even appreciate I am doing so – Nicole catches me red handed and asks me if I am leaving (which over the past week is about the only thing she has actually said to me. But she has said it several times.) and I say that I am.
“Well,” she says looking delighted, “It was lovely meeting you.”
She helps me out the door by standing out of the way and watching. As I close the door behind me, she stands tensed in the middle of the room, and as the latch clicks into place, it is accompanied by a little whoop.

Having wanted to move anywhere with little regard to where I actually ended up, I booked myself into a place called The Greenhouse situated in the middle of the city centre, one street over from Flinders Street Station.
The Greenhouse – although boasting a good write up in the Lonely Planet – is a hostel converted not from a Nunnery, but from the top three floors of an office building. The rooms are clean and spare. Four bunks and four lockers per room, the rooms accessed by long white anonymous corridors, the doors opened with swipe cards which hum and click in the locks.
Oddly, the dividing walls of the rooms are simple partition arrangements and are not properly fixed to either the ceilings or the walls on either side. They are very thin and anything said in one room can be heard throughout the entire floor and should you lean upon them, they will sag and threaten to topple. I have slapstick images of the one leant on wall provoking a domino reaction throughout the entire floor.
Most fun of all, if you turn the light off in the room you are in, the walls on either side become lit with square haloes from the rooms one either side.
The Greenhouse is a machine for storing backpackers in.
I am sharing the hostel with a Japanese guy who does not speak any English. We exchange the usual sign language greetings and I do not see much of him until I come back in the evening to find him sitting cross legged on the top bunk wearing a vest and boxer shorts with a large packet of crisps in his lap.
He spends the next two hours eating the crisps. One at time, crunching and chewing each one the recommended daily amount. I lie beneath him with my book waiting for him to finish the packet, but I swear it is bottomless. When he turns his light out and passes out, he then snores so loudly that we get complaints from down the corridor.

My next choice of hostel is called Toad Hall. I pick it because the prices of the single rooms are reasonable and I feel that I deserve – no, I demand – a room to myself for a few nights. The room is rather cupboard like, but has a sink and a fridge, with a kettle and ceramic mug sitting upon it.
The building itself breaks several laws of special physics by existing. Corridors sweep round where by logic rooms should be. The building is made up of two separate buildings with the gap that was once between them having been replaced by carpeted corridors. The result makes no sense, and resembles a cross between a 1950s seaside B&B and Gormenghast. Think gothic labyrinth with wall-to-wall carpet and paisley wallpaper and you’re really not far off. There are hundreds of doors off the long winding corridors which must lead to bedrooms of some sort, but I never seem to see anyone else about. On the walk from my room to the bathroom along the creaking floorboards of the hallway, I occasionally see a doorway hastily close at my approach, but other than that, life seems very quiet at Toad Hall. This, I decide, checking that the lock on my room is secure, and setting a chair beneath the door handle, may well be a very good thing indeed.