[hippoyawn]

About a year ago I did some travelling for about 6 months. As I like to travel frugal I usually stayed in hostels. One hostel in Sao Paulo was particularly interesting, so I'll try and relate my experience in full.

I had about a week to spend in Sao Paulo, so booked a hostel in advance and got in around midday. The hostel concierge showed me to my room, which was a mixed dorm of 6 beds (3 bunk beds). When I got to my room, I found that despite the room being mixed, there wasn't any women in it, just 3 other guys. This didn't really bother me, I don't have a lot of money so when I stay at these places it's really an economical decision. The hostel also had an 'only-female' dorm, which I saw on my way up the stairs was next to the mixed dorm. The door to it was shut always, and it had a sign on the front of it saying 'female dorm - please keep closed'. The concierge explained a few things in my dorm and then showed me to my bed, which was situated next to the wall which parted the female dorm and my dorm. I was pretty tired from my journey to Sao Paulo and needed some sleep fairly quickly. But what I did notice before I fell asleep was that a lot of the wall that parted the two rooms was actually just a big window that had been blurred (some sort of film had been put on it that stopped you from seeing through). This wasn't incredibly exciting to me, you couldn't really see through to the other room, at best you could see some shapes, so I didn't see much opportunity for seeing anyone changing. However, in the bottom right of the window, close to where my headspace was, there was a big sticker on the window which covered most of the bottom right except for a small patch in the bottom right corner. Surprisingly, when I looked at this bottom right corner, I noticed the blurry film had been scratched off, allowing me to view part of the female dorm quite clearly. I got a little bit excited but I was also very tired, so decided to go to sleep first.

More in a bit.