This morning I woke up, showered and went to gather my bread and some eggs for breakfast. Unfortunately this was not possible because my bread was MIA. Why someone would feel the need to steal half a loaf of bread is beyond me. It made me start thinking about the mentality of a lot of backpackers. My experience has been that a significant portion of backpackers are extremely selfish people. The loaf of bread cost wise doesn't bother me. It was not even worth $4. It will not be a huge financial burden to replace. The issue I have is with the fact that someone decided it was acceptable to steal and unguarded half loaf of bread from my room. It had to have been one of my roommates. I store all my food in the little storage kitchen in our room. There is no choice but to leave it unguarded. However there should be no need to guard the food because all of us are in the same boat. We are all working to travel as cheaply as possible and cut costs where possible and cooking your own food is a good way to do it. I respect other peoples food and they should respect mine.
After the bread incident I started thinking about an event last night. Around 10PM one of the security people from the hostel came in and told everyone that if the kitchen was clean in 15 minutes the lounge area would be closed down. He stated that while the mess wasn't necessarily ours it definitely wasn't the cleaning peoples mess. So we all gathered together and cleaned up the kitchen which was admittedly pretty bad. What's frustrating is that there is a reasonable likelihood that some or all of us in no way contributed to it and in fact did our jobs. I know I for one washed, dried and put away all of the dishes involved in making my pasta. Regardless the kitchen was strewn with unwashed dishes and not just unwashed dishes but dishes that had not even seen attempts at washing. For example of saucepan sitting on the main-counter caked with uneaten rice. There was unwashed dishes just strewn about the kitchen and piled in the sinks. There was even half cooked egg spilled over one of the stove elements. I noticed same behavior at the hostel in Auckland only on a much larger scale likely due to the size of the hostel. In some of the conversations I have had with people a lot of people have this resentment towards hostels and I get the feeling that it is due to the fact that accommodation likely makes up the largest expense for most backpackers. It often seems like people feel that for the $27NZD ($17.98) a night they're paying for their room that someone else should have clean up after them. This once more illustrates my idea that a good portion of back packers are not only quite self-centered but also quite lazy. Two qualities that quite often coincide.
The last thing I noticed today while waiting to cook my dinner. The kitchen has a real shortage of pots for cooking. This creates a problem because a large majority of people like to make pasta and rice. Today there was an obvious queue waiting for pots and someone finished cooking and actually took the pot outside with them and used it to serve from and held onto it while others waited around for pots. I personally just waited for the kitchen to clear out and watched TV because I wasn't starving. When I finally went to cook my pasta in the empty kitchen there was still someone with a pot the sized I needed who was eating out of it. Another person had a left a pot half full of pasta and sauce sitting on the counter and the third of the size I required was sitting with the last remnants of some kind of cream based sauce in it on one of the elements. Someone had obviously just left it there for someone else to deal with.
That's all for this post. Goodnight everyone.
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