Oh the People You Meet

My hostel in Nice is full of these real life characters that I would love to write into a story. Their idiosyncrasies remind me of the regulars in the cafe Amélie works at, although that's probably just because they're French.

The man who works the evening shift at reception always seems to wear the same red shirt with his wide-legged black parachute pants that end just above his ankles. When he runs (never walks) to do something, his pant legs balloon out and his arms inevitably begin to wave above his head in a very dramatic way regardless of what the issue is. He appears to be perpetually disgruntled. I sat in the common room facing the reception area during the evenings, and I noticed his habit of grabbing a bottle of air freshener and spraying it in small, short bursts throughout the length of the reception/bar area. At first I couldn't place the PSSHT! PSSHT! PSSSSSHT! Sound that the aerosol can produced, but I quickly learned to look up every ten minutes to see this guy rising from his chair, grabbing his can, walking the ten steps to get to the end of the bar, and then returning to sit down to in front of his computer spraying the sweet, fabricated smell of floral bouquet the whole way. I have no idea what horrible stench he was continually smelling that needed to be covered up, but every 10 minutes on the dot he would be up and spraying.

When I arrived at the hostel on the first day, there was an older woman sitting outside on the small patio outside of the hostel. While many of the hostels I have stayed at have had very nice outdoor sitting areas, this patio was basically just a concrete slab with some hedges lining the property and one scraggly tree in the middle. Nevertheless, this woman was out sitting on a chair without appearing to be do anything. Just sitting. Over the next 4 days of my stay in Nice, the woman was always either following the measly amount of shade around the patio in her chair or floating (never walking) around the main floor of the hostel examining the bright white bandages that mysteriously covered the fingers on her left hand.

My favourite man had a mop of curly dark brown hair and sleepy eyes. At first he seemed to be just your average traveller, but as soon as he sat down at a table to read anything (a map, a book, even a crossword puzzle) he would lower his head as close to the page as possible, only leaving enough room between his eye and the table for a magnifying glass. How he could read anything like that I will never know. Especially the crossword.