So two days after I turned 21 I got on an airplane for the 2nd time in my life and headed to Europe (England specifically) to visit Katie, who was living there as an Au Pair. I hadn't slept in a few days because of the fact that I just turned 21 (par-tay) and the fact that I was really nervous about flying the night before my early morning departure- planes scare me, a lot. This sleepless was not helped by the fact that I was seated next to a French man on the plane who smelled like B.O. and who kept me awkwardly pressed up against the window for the entire 8 hour flight from Seattle to Paris.
When I finally made it to London it was morning there and Katie met me at the airport. We took a train into London where we were planning on staying at the Piccadelli Backpacker's Hostel. After getting off the London Underground I dragged my HUGE piece of luggage up, out of the subway system, into the middle of London. We wandered around Piccadelli Square (which is similar to NY's time square I guess) for a while. We finally found our hostel, locked our things in our shared, 4 person hostel room and wandered out into the city. We did some shopping (hello H&M for the first time ever - little did I know how much my love for H&M would grow over the years, especially when H&M came to Seattle), I heard "young folks" for the first time ever while shopping for Christmas ornaments, we ate Indian food, and I went to Harrod's for the first (and only so far) time ever. It was a really nice day.
Finally, we wandered back to our hostel and then to a nearby pub to grab a beer before bed. After one strong beer I was a little tipsy - I blame the lack of sleep - and the bar was closing so we walked out into the alleyway. As we were walking along, being loud and taking picture we came upon two guys who were about our age. It was one of their birthday, they felt the need to tell us, and I told them that it was just my birthday too, WOW! So we started talking and decided to wander with the random men to go get falafels or some other delicious street food.
While walking along with the boys we learned that they were from Amsterdam and they were a little out of control. We soon told them that we were tired and needed to head back to our hostel and quickly found out that, hey, they were staying at the same hostel as us. So they walked us back. They then invited us to their room for drinks. We were hesitant, being two innocent 21 year old girls from a small town in Washington, and so we said that we first wanted to our room to drop our things, planning on ditching out on the boys like little cowards. This is when we met, for the first time, our hostel roommates. After meeting them and realizing that one of them was not very friendly we decided to go have a drink with our new "friends". We went to their room and when we discovered that they were simply taking pulls from a bottle of liquor and talking about how going to prison in Amsterdam isn't nearly as bad as going to prison in America - because you don't have to worry about dropping the soap and getting it in the butt - we decided that maybe taking our chances with the hostel roommates really was the superior option. So, Katie and I, after about 5 minutes decided that we should tell the boys that we were tired and wanted to go. They wouldn't have this... So then we told them that we had to go to the bathroom, excused ourselves and ran back to our room.
Back at the room we had our first real conversation with our hostel roommies. One of them asked me why we were in England, I told him I was there for Thanksgiving break visiting Katie who was living there. The other roommie then told us that he hated Americans. AWESOME. With fear in my heart I told him I was Native American so I kind of hated Americans too... it was really all I had. Super shaken up, I then grabbed my toothbrush and gave Katie the look. She and I then went to the bathroom to brush our teeth and more importantly devised a plan to sleep together in one twin sized bottom bunk bed so that if we were to get attacked/raped in our sleep at least the other one would know and we could fight the American-hater-scary-roommate off of us and scream really loud for help, or something.
We hesitantly went back into our room, quickly crawled into a bed together and said goodnight. Not two minutes later we heard knocking on our door. We told the roommates that these guys were being weird to us and to just not answer it. They kept knocking and we could hear the boys from Amsterdam talking outside. After a few minutes they left and we thought we were in the clear. We thought wrong. Just a few moment later we hear their heavily accented voices approaching our door once again and then they started yelling at us to come our of our room. When we didn't answer, the crazy Amsterdam boys KICKED IN the door.
The door flies open and the roommate who didn't seem to hate Americans as much as the other, like a sweet sweet angle, swiftly jumped off the top bunk, ran after the boys and tackled one in the hall. The other Amsterdam boy bolted down the stairwell and ran back to his room. The American hater roommate went up to the office with us to get the manager while the favorite roommate held down crazy Amsterdam boy #1. The manager told us to stay in a room his office and went down to get the boys. We were in tears, hiding in a small little room in a hostel in a foreign country after having crazy foreign boys (who were most likely on drugs) kick in our door. After only being able to find the tackled Amsterdam boy, because the other was hiding like a little biatch in his room, the manager asked us if we knew what room they were in. We told him. Amsterdam boy #2 was apprehended and then the police came. Katie didn't want to give a statement because she had over-stayed her visit in the fine country of England and didn't want to be deported so we told them that we didn't want to press charges.
Needless to say, we got moved to a double room, the Amsterdam boys were kicked out of the hostel in the early hours of the morning, we had fear in our heart that they were going to come back and kick our door in again, and I definitely barely slept that night. I woke up the next morning feeling like I had the worst hangover ever (thanks to severe sleep deprivation and jetlag that lasted my entire week long trio), and a pretty good story about the time I was assaulted in a backpacker hostel in London.
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