Travelogue
During my travels, I usually collect three or four personal accounts which I then recount in emails to friends. And since they find them very entertaining, I reckoned you might too. A travelogue is born.
From: Ilse
To: Harold F.
Date: 20 October 2007
Subject: The Roommate
Well that does sound cool. Hope you'll get what you were after. Meanwhile here in Ireland, I am back at the Neptunes hostel for one night. I will drive to Rosslare in the morning and from there head home. So far weatherwise and photographywise Ireland has been good. Only one morning of rain and about twenty good pictures and counting.
'The Burren' indeed turned out to be a barren place, but not quite what I had anticipated. Whether it is because it is a trying place to live, or because the season is almost over, the people in the tourist industry were inhospitable. Most other guests of my hostel were eastern European laborers. They don't talk, don't laugh, claim not to speak English and are at times downright rude. The locals were friendly though.
Which nationality my roommate of two nights bore, I never figured out. Mainly because she didn't speak, of course. She was pretty scary, I would not have been surprised if I had woken up to the shiny blade of her knife, split seconds before she committed the act that would make me world famous. I decided she must either be of a very foreign country, physically sick, totally crackers, or just plain drunk all the time. I was so happy to see her pack and leave after two days, it inspired me to a song which I sang all day.
I thought she must be a laborer too, but the receptionist claimed she was on holiday. Judging by the boots she wore, she must be hiking in daytime. She also wore - and I am not kidding here - a ski suit. I could hear it crackle as she took it off late at night. She would do that in pitch-darkness, after a night hanging in a lazy chair in the television room. I know, because every time I walked by, I would check if she was still there. And she was, in fact without moving so much as a finger.
After she took her clothes off she would rearrange her luggage, making more peculiar noises which I will here write down to a badly fitted floorboard. Then she would - again in the dark - go to the bathroom and presumably freshen herself up. Any visible proof of the "freshening" lacked though. More strange sounds came from the bathroom, I cannot begin to imagine what she did and what she used to do it with. It included tap, toilet and nose snorting sounds simultaneously. I don't think she ever used the shower.
Our mystery lady did use tissues however, and left a trail throughout the room. I even found one between my bags, she must have been poking her snorted nose into my business. And then, for the "pièce de résistance", she would go into bed, rub her legs to the sheets making that sound that make your hair stand on end, and finally crack a toe. This must have been her bed time ritual, because she did the exact same thing two nights in a row.
Anyway, apart from a couple of nice shots of a foggy sunrise, countryside scenes, blue mountains, and a religious site, county Clare and Galway were a little disappointing. On the drive down south today I added to my portfolio with images of cows and a wedding.
Okay, I'll leave you to your doings now, while I go on with some website design and another cup-a-Joe.
Ilse