Hellga
Upon arriving in our hostel in Berlin two things were immediately noticeable:
1: Our hostel had a very obvious Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy theme.
2: Our roommate was a 50 year old German women who spoke no English.
These facts together made coming back to the hostel each night both hillarious and unsettling at the same time. Our roommate (Hellga, we’ll call her) ran away from her family after her husband of 35 years died in a horrible car accident while travelling abroad. Every night before she went to bed (which was around 7:30pm) she would arrange what she would wear the next morning on a chair, read his final letter, and then cry herself to sleep. At least this is the life Nicole and i assigned to her once we realized that, being able to speak no English, she would never be able to prove us wrong. Tragic, really.
Because she both went to bed and got up so early, we never got to have an actual conversation with Hellga. Also, the whole we-don’t-speak-German-you-don’t-speak-English thing got in the way of meaningful dialouge. Despite this fact, there are some things we did know for sure about her. She did fold her black skirt and ruffled blouse very carefully. She dissapproved of us coming to bed at 10pm, let alone 5:30am, a dissapproval shown through the light on her indiglo watch and a “harumph.” She snored like a banshee.
One night Hellga’s deep German snores were interrupted as she woke up suddenly and flipped on a flashlight that she must have been keeping next to her bed. Nicole, having brought earplugs on the trip, had already fallen asleep, leaving me the only witness to her rude awakening. She proceeded to turn her flashlight on and off about 7 times before letting her old-lady-flatulance get the best of her, falling back asleep, and filling the room with her epic snores once more.
