Alligator Tears

And so had ended our crazy Canadian adventure. We three girls were now off to city-hop the East Coast on our own, which meant back to staying in hostels instead of the lovely hotels that "TOURS4FUN" had provided for us.

We arrived in Boston and took the T train to a beautifully leafy street in the Back Bay to find our hostel. It was in a gorgeous area that you could walk to from just about everywhere, but looked mainly residential and quite homely despite being so close to central Boston. We dragged our suitcases through the drizzle, cheerfully practicing our Matt Damon and Ben Affleck Bostonian drawls until we got to 40 Berkely Street. It was a beautiful old building with amazing huge living spaces and sofas and ceiling-to-floor windows letting in the occasional mighty rays of sunshine in between spells of rainfall. So lovely, and so much more than we had dared to expect.

Until, that is, the night began to fall. Gradually, then, as if some sort of bizarre dog whistle too high for regular hearing had been blown, groups of very strange people began to emerge. We began to have our hunches that this was not your normal hostel. Granted, there were a few groups of travelers our age -which by the way was refreshing after the strictly middle-aged tourbus we had lived on for the previous week - and we did encounter the token groups of Australians cracking open some cans before 5pm each day. But this particular establishment seemed to be full of not-quite-with-it elderly occupants: some not even that elderly, but definitely all the more not-quite-with-it. The first we met when after very ignorantly closing our bedroom door with mild force, she took it upon herself to hobble over with her crooked cane, hair in curlers, back arched, to tell us off, stating that "people are sleeping, don't you know it's past seven-thirty at night?" Others we came across wandering the halls, riding the lifts - 7th floor, 3rd floor, 5th floor, 3rd floor, 6th floor, 3rd floor... and so on. All the while wearing vacant expressions and resilient young people on their arms who seemed to be trying their best to guide them to their rooms with calm words and steady steps.

We decided collectively that night, tucked up in our sweet 3-person bedroom overlooking the picturesque little green garden below, that either we had wandered into the urban east-coast Twilight Zone, or this so-called 'hostel' was doubling up as a halfway house.

Listening to: "Alligator" - Tegan and Sara, Four Tet remix.

Have a listen here.


Read my article about travel in this month's issue of Novel Magazine here.