As a teen, I would often converse with the person in the seat beside me. On two separate occasions, I met girls with very similar stories: they were in their twenties and visiting boyfriends in India that they had gotten to know over email. One was a German girl dating a Muslim boy; the other…
Category: Interesting Strangers
No One Needs to Know Who I Am
When I was in university, I went through a phase that lasted about half a decade where I was extremely cynical of strangers wanting to know who I was or about my life. This was in the late 2000s; I had finally acquired a Facebook account and learned that anyone could Google me and acquire…
My Move to India, or How I Got Conned
In Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, there’s a paragraph where the main character remembers on the stupid decisions made by herself and her friend at the age of fifteen. She reflects that people should be locked up for a year at that age in a paragraph that seemed puzzling as a teenager, and…
The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 3)
On the last day of the conference, a few fellow conference goers asked me about where I was staying. We were talking over lunch at an affordable Chinese place not too far from the fancy hotel that served as the conference venue. “It’s a hostel that’s filthy and smells like pot,” I responded. “And it’s…
The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 2)
On day 2 of the conference, I walked up the hill through the rain to attend the 6am coffee session. After that, still pretty damp, I attended panel after panel. I’d forgotten my phone in the hostel, so after lunch (just as I was starting to feel dry) I rushed back to the hostel to…
The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 1)
I dragged my larger-than-necessary suitcase from Powell Station to the hostel on 6th. I’d just flown in from Tokyo for the San Francisco Writer’s Conference that started the next day. I was exhausted and my phone was not making my day any easier: the battery would lose charge like sand through a sieve, and it…