After a good night sleep I was up early to return my Oyster Card for my £3 deposit and get to Victoria on time for my bus to Portsmouth. I made my bus with time to spare and luckily slept most of the way there. In no time I was at the Portsmouth and Southsea Backpackers Lodge. The hostel seems like a nice enough place, the owners seemed decent anyhow.
My first, and really only stop for this day was the D-Day Museum and the Overlord Embroidery. The Embroidery was commissioned in 1968 to commemorate WWII with a focus on D-Day, or Operation Overlord. The woman who designed the embroidery also made watercolors of each of the 34 panels. These paintings are now in the Pentagon. The whole thing was really fantastic. The history was correct and an embroidery was an interesting way to represent WWII. I definitely would recommend that anyone take the trek to Portsmouth to see it.
The embroidery wasn't the only part of the museum. There was also a rather detailed and lengthy section on WWII and D-Day. I liked the way that they pretty much admitted that without US help with arms and soldiers the war would have been lost. I really enjoyed this museum and could talk about it for hours, but I really see no need to bore you with all of the gory details. If you want to hear them drop me a line and I will be happy to share.
I spent a few hours just wandering around Portsmouth. It's basically a more summer oriented city. I passed a closed amusement area with tons of arcade games and a few rides. I walked along the coastal barrier and checked out the remaining towers that Henry VIII had commissioned. There were various WWII monuments. Portsmouth was hit very hard during the war. One of the not WWII related monuments was to Europeans who emigrated to America. There was also the huge Spinniker Tower to check out. I decided not to go up it.
I wandered through the cute shopping areas on my way back to the hostel. By the time I had returned from dinner (there didn't seem to be any St. Patties celebrations going on) two German women had moved into my room. There was also another guy there, but he didn't speak any English. I was happy to be at such a quite place after the loud hostel I was at in London. The German women must have been as worn out as I was because they didn't seem to have a problem when I switched off the light around 10pm.
I don't think that it was even 30 minutes later when the hostel owner showed another woman into our room. Instantly a foul mix of BO and alcohol filled the room. As she tossed and gurgled (yes gurgled) into her bed I could see that her clothes didn't match and that her luggage as just a plastic bag. She was clearly homeless.
Over the next 20 or so minutes the smell grew stronger and stronger. I felt very uneasy in the room and began to lock up all of my bags. I could tell that the German women were also uncomfortable. I searched my brain for how to ask them in German if they smelled it to and what they thought we should do, but it was blank. Eventually the homeless woman got up to use the restroom.
I asked if they smelled it too. They both said that the could not sleep because of the smell. Annika (the daughter of the mother – daughter pair) and I went to complain. I realize that hostels aren't always perfectly safe and that sometimes they smell a bit and sometimes they are a bit dirty. Despite this I feel that there should be some degree of comfort. There was no sleeping with this smell.
As we complained the hostel owner told us that he felt bad for her because she was homeless and that is wasn't about the money. He tried his best to make us both feel as guilty as possible. He kept asking if we could please just deal with it for one night. He said that he just wanted to do the good thing. We kept saying no, he should never have let her in. Plus, that hostel holds about 40 people, there were at least 2 empty rooms on the floor I was on alone, not to mention the upstairs. If he wanted to do the right thing why didn't he just give her a room of her own so she doesn't disturb us?
In the end he did ask her to leave. It took over an hour with the window open to get rid of the smell. For a bit we were worried that perhaps she had wet the bed while she was there. The good that came out of this is that I got to speak to Annika for quite a bit. She was in the UK to research how Charles Dickens in marketed in modern day Britain for a class assignment.
I guess every bad travel story somehow morphs into a positive one.
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