Byestreet 21


I'm sitting in my room right now, and just for the purposes of context here, I'd like to point out that I really am sitting in my room. My room, as opposed to the room that was assigned to me that faces the highway, spouting up copious amounts of exhaust and soot, as if the drivers are trying to convey their mutual hate for me and my luxury of sleeping at that hour while they are condemned to slogging it down the highway in their comfortably air conditioned vehicles. But anyway, I really am sitting in the room belonging to me, the one facing the rather large field that spews out colonies of exotic insects that asail my room light while I express my envy at the lady who sells drinks at our school, who happens to own a bug zapper shaped like a tennis racket, with a rather intimidating lightning-bolt in the center of it. Truly, that device is the closet you will ever get to reliving Greek mythology.

Back to the topic of me being in my room: I love it. I've never quite appreciated my room, with its dastardly pink cupboards, constantly declaring their pride in their lifestyle choices, the gaudy shade of green that plagues the walls, verging on breaking into the chorus of "Give Peace a Chance", and the haphazard combination of pillows on my bed, with pillow cases of such random variety that they emulate a family with siblings of stupidly different age groups. One has clothed bears on it, apparently going through some sort of species identity crisis, while another seems to be channelling its desire to be a kaleidoscope. But while they're all so terribly gaudy they're an essential part of the monstrosity that is my room. And I've never really been very fond of it until the point where seeing the same room appear in every single door on nearly every single floor got slightly monotonous at times. The rooms in the hostel differ only in terms of which tired, homesick people they contain, so it's refreshing to be blinded by the psychedelic qualities of my room again.

But it wasn't so much my room that I thought about after returning from a fairly gruelling day of setting people on fire and pushing back carts filled with explosives that could possibly set people on fire. I had a brief exchange with the wonderful Irsyad (this here being just for him) on what we would first do upon getting home (our respective ones), and I did so reply that the first thing I would do would be to get a pot, pour some water into it and set fire to that water, then once that water had enough I would proceed to unload a good chunk of noodles, an egg, and a few frozen wantons into the mixture, then let it burn a bit more just to make a point. The point being that I would probably be really hungry by then, and that I couldn't remember the last time I cooked noodles for supper in the whimsically described "wee hours" of the night (possibly morning based on the general wee-ness of the day/night at that point), though I can remember that it definitely wasn't in the last three weeks.

So while I was actually doing that, I stood around and admired the semi-sheen that the kitchen floor had. I wasn't used to it, since over the last three weeks I had been more accustomed to admiring how much of the floor I could see. There were a few specks of dirt near the stove, but drastically different compared to the few specks of stove in the hostel pantry.

At that point the contents of the pot aimed to change that and it occurred to me that I should probably adhere to the Geneva Convention and just eat the damn thing.

It was very tasty. Very much tastier than I had remembered it being. But then again, maybe it wasn't so much the actual food that was tasty, which I thought was the only possible case till this point. Maybe it was the clean chairs that contributed to the tastiness of the noodles, hopefully through indirect means. Maybe it was the fact that I could finally cook that bowl of noodles that made it so much tastier. Maybe it was everything but the food that made it so good.

I remember, this sentence adding at least twenty years to my age just by writing it, that there used to be a restaurant called Baystreet 21 at IMM. It had a very conservative, leathery sort of colour scheme to it, and there were dim hanging lights that exhumed photoscopic veils onto the tables. There was also this big wooden board with a ship relief carved onto it. Soft lounge music would play in the background while you carved into your Dory, making the lounge music an impromptu hymn, but that's killing my point here. My point is that it was cozy. It felt sophisticated and comfortable. The food may not be as good as I remembered, but the actual place definitely was.

Now, the place has been renovated into a diner's about as organized as my pillows, with very large tomatoes and lettuce covering the walls of the place, some of which were provided by customers leaving in disgust. The whole place looks like a McDonald's branch, and the only thing missing here is a Reminiscence meal of some kind. The food isn't even that good anymore. But then again, maybe the food just as good as it used to be. Maybe it's not the actual food that's declined, but the overall restaurant. But then again, maybe what I remembered it to be simply appears so perfect because of nostalgia or some other vague poetic term. Maybe that warm, pleasant Baystreet 21 never really was that toasty and enjoyable, but I still miss it all the same.

The Hostel California

Well it's been a gruelling two weeks so far, which tend to be slightly better on Mondays, when they actually serve porridge, which isn't all that bad, and in actual fact I can't really complain about the whole concept of staying at the hostel during the weekdays and jumping onto a number 198 bus and having to trek home on the weekends while carrying a laptop that would have rather stayed at the hostel and plugged itself into the morbidly, sky blue colored LAN cable dangling from the LAN port next to my bed that I was too lazy to remove from, and proceed to wistfully watch Fry and Laurie videos till 2am in the morning.

People have taken a lot of different approaches to having to stay in the hostel. Some people squeal with delight every time the friendly, charming hostel biometric scanners beep twice and beam an approving green, while others (I might be mistaken here) attempt to poke out that stupid little bastard's eye out with their fingernails after having been rejected for the fifth time in a row. Others remember that they should be going up to do their laundry and come down to the library just in time to study, but I'm sure that we can all describe these studious, dilligent students as negligible. Well, not so much, actually, or rather, many. Lots of people find that it's a lot easier for them to get work doen when they are stringently enforced to do so, which is something that equally unenthusiastic classmates can never really contribute to much, so it's nice to see people experienced in totalalitarianism take up the matter into their own cold, leather gloved hands.

But what I've noticed (the party's over, is it?) is the drastic difference in responses to hostel life from various people, and while that might have happened with other issues in the past, it's never been something that's been so evident, especially when the effects of their enthuasiasm/hemlock are clearly visible for two weeks. It's at the end of those two weeks when the stances that people take to the same conditions really start to show, and I'm wondering if they might eventually even out in a few months time, and we might all start reverting back to normality, at least until we all have to go home at the end of the year and have trouble trying to find the biometric scanners on our apartment doors.