All told, I find that in the last week I’ve slept with a Chinaman, three black women from the United States, four South Korean women and one South Korean man.
I slept with the South Korean man first, for two nights running, at the Chameleon Hostel in Alicante. Joon-woo and I shared a 9’ by 8’ four-bunk cell. We were both on the bottom, 18 inches apart. This quiet, cheerful chap was always showered and in his black pyjamas and yellow duck head slippers by 9 p.m. and fast asleep by 10. He slept silently and soundly and with no discernible movement until 9 or 10 in the morning, when he would greet me with the same smiling equanimity with which he had said goodnight. He had been in Spain for 40 days, he said, visiting the stadiums of lower league Spanish football clubs. So far he’d clocked up 22. He had heard that Britain had the worst food in Europe, an accusation which boggled his mind, he told me, because he couldn’t imagine anything worse than Spanish food. Although he was too polite to say so, I formed the impression that he found Europe a decaying, inefficient, third world sort of a place, and that this was a great surprise to him.
The four South Korean women and I slept together in a six-bunk dormitory at the Go! Hostel in Alicante. They were all slender and darkly pretty and seemed to find everything uproariously funny — including their first sight of the 60-year-old depressed Englishman they found tucked up in his bunk at 9 o’clock in the evening reading Heart of Darkness by the light of a head torch with a broken strap. They literally fell helplessly about, clutching their sides and crying.
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