The first adventure in Panama? It has to be the hostel, where we were booked into the dorms. Erwan has only slept in dorms once before on a stag due in NYC, and then, the group had the whole dorm to themselves.
So how was it for him? Well it started a bit special. . .
We arrived late, as planned at 3 am (already exhausted after a long lay over and red-eye flight). When “moving in”, we tried to be as discreet as possible – using light from phone and slipping simply into our beds as quietly as possible as anyone with hostel etiquette would do. Time for sleep! Not so much – the man in the bunk across from us decided he was going to snore – like really snore. Dude was loud! Jen could hear him through her earplugs (and hands over ears) and even Erwan got woken up (who sleeps with podcasts and when a child, he could sleep while his mom vacuumed around him).
Two other guys in the room were whistling to try to shut him up. Erwan immediately knew these guys were French – whistling to stop snoring is so Francais (it’s from a famous comedy with Louis de Funes, but it does not work – just adds more noise in the room).
After 2 hours of snoring, the French guys moved out at 6 am, and the snoring dude wakes up shortly thereafter to start his day. He was completely well rested, unlike the rest of us. We try to sleep a bit longer, to no avail and we just have to catch up on Zs later in the day with naps.
That day we met the other dorm mates and we all bonded over our shared pain of the snoring guy (turns out such a loud snorer is only 0.5% of the population). We also came up with plans of how to address it the following night, including moving his mattress into the hall and/or chipping in to buy him a room elsewhere. We never saw the snoring dude that day and he was the last one to come back in the evening.
Fortunately it was not needed though – the following night, he did not snore nearly as bad. It didn’t wake Erwan at all and Jen only heard it when she popped to the loo in the middle of the night. Snoring dude then checked out that morning.
The rest of the stay was fine – the hostel had good, clean facilities, fun communal spaces and friendly staff. Yet, needless to say, the whole ordeal the first night did not convince Erwan that hostel dorms are for him. . .
Dear Georgie Boy 