I'm writing this in retrospect as I have been in the back end of beyond for the last week - Ooh Steph, you'll love this - I was working in a place called St. Helens lol! I've included a couple of photos so you can see what our St helens would look like with the lights on ;o)
St Helens Town Centre:
vs 
The St Helen's waterfront
vs 
Anyway, more of that later. When I left you we were discussing my stay in the hostel before being picked up for my conservation work on Monday. There had been minor food theft on the Friday night and then some backpacker helped themselves to my cooking oil on the Saturday night.
Talking of oil - is it just me or are there some sleazy blokes around when you travel nowadays? I don't know if I was just to dumb to notice previously or maybe a bit happy-go-lucky but there are some men who stay in hostels who you really wouldn't want mixing with young women. A mildish case in point was the guy who was sat on the balcony on my first night on Friday and within two sentences had told me that he was a masseur before his last job. I'm pretty sure this was supposed to illicit a response from me along the lines of 'Oh really, ok then perfect stranger why don't I just get topless and you can try out your technique on me right here right now - maybe a full body massage? Let's do it! In fact, sod the massage, let's have sex instead.' I wasn't biting so he moved on two some giggling girlies behind me. Fair enough. The next day I found the same guy hitting on the receptionist in the hostel."I was a masseur and I was staying in a hostel on the balcony and I'd met these two girls, glamour models, who were here on a shoot and they remembered me from before and asked me to come and massage them... blah blah blah... anyway, I'll leave my number here if you want to give me a call and we can grab a coffee sometime" From the look on the receptionist's face, I'm guessing that would be a "No". I mean really? Would any self-respecting woman want to be with a serial glamour-model-massaging-try-it-on-with-anything-female-hostel-lurking low life? She'd probably heard him use the same line on other girls the same way I had. Ugh!
Now I'm usually willing to give everybody the benefit of the doubt but my spider senses were up with this fella and that's never a good sign. If he was a well-meaning guy who just happened to like to spend his weekends offering to massage young girls in hostels I apologise. If that IS the case, he really needs to sort out his approach to the opposite sex. And before you accuse me of being paranoid, I've been a barmaid out here and I know a line when I hear one. I also know what spending long days with only men and cattle for company can do to the locals so trust me on this one!!
Where was I? Right, greasy oily objects and criminal behaviour. SO my cooking oil was stolen which meant that the Koreans would have meat but no way to cook it so I had to replace it out of my own cash. WELL, then there was Sunday night. Some of the hostel guests decided to get very drunk. I think sleazy guy scored; I could hear someone telling a very drunk sounding young girl that he was very good at massages as the door closed to his private room opposite at about 3am. You know, sometimes I feel like I should protect these kids but at this point I just hoped to god that she had some clue as to what she was doing and didn't regret it in the morning.
Well, Sunday morning arrived and it turned out that practically everybody's food had vanished with the dawn. I'm not just talking a bit of milk and some toast this time, I'm talking ALL our food from the boxes for the conservation guys including my lunch prepared the day before. Some other guests had their 24 beers stolen from the fridge and we all felt pretty fed up about it. Being the boyscout that I am I had slept with some muesli and fruit under my pillow so we had something for breakfast just in case. I'm reading 'Quantum of Solace' at the moment and I was trying to imagine James Bond sleeping with muesli under his pillow instead of a gun - don't think that would have made him quite the superspy we know and love! It was ridiculous - the place looked like a wartime supermarket. It makes me laugh - these backpackers are richer than I've ever seen; they all have laptops and iphones but it was the loaf of bread and some beers that got stolen first. Someone had put some very offensive signs on the fridges that told the thief what we thought of them in no uncertain terms. I suspect the Koreans have now learned a colourful set of new vocabulary.
I heard from sleazy guy the next day that he had stopped some guy climbing over the back fence to get into the kitchen so it looks like the thief may not have been a backpacker after all. Still sucks though.
On a nicer note, allow me to introduce you to Team Korea, my workmates for the week. One of my three Korean blokes looks a bit feminine to me and, unless the airport x-ray machine did something fairly scary to him, is actually a girl and not a boy. His name is 'Ellie' and his buddies are 'Andy' and 'Thomas'. Koreans will always give you their English name when they introduce themselves because they hate the way that westerners mangle their actual names. Of course this means that the first thing you have to do is ask them for their real names and then proceed to mangle them in the best way you can just for fun. So here goes, Ellie is Miryang, Andy is Ewungee and Thomas is Heesok. I bet you sound just like I did when I tried those for the first time. Even the other Koreans couldn't pronounce Miryang's name so they called her Ellie too.
Knowing that Koreans have meat for breakfast, followed by meat with meat on the side for lunch with a chaser of meat for afternoon tea and then more meat with meat for dinner, I tried to break it to them gently that they were going to be eating vegetarian food on the work placement and that the rest of our food had been stolen but hey - I had some muesli! They took it pretty well I thought - they smiled politely but I'm sure I saw Andy starting sizing up the hostel cat for portions. It could have been worse though, somehow we found that the thief hadn't got to some strips of beef for them to eat on the Sunday night so Tiddles lived another day.
We were going to meet the rest of the volunteers on Monday so I had to make sure that everyone was up and about by 8am and that we had packed up the few things that the food thief hadn't gone for (funnily enough my vacuum packed tofu hadn't quite made the grade, neither had my rice paper wraps or meat free sausages. I'm not saying that veggie food's bad out here but when it gets left behind in a blanket raid on anything edible I think it says a lot!!). Might need that Big Mac after all Neil...
That's all for the Monday. I'm injured again obviously and it's fairly painful sitting here right now but will explain all in the next note.
Elsie
