An american and an australian walk into a hostel room...

Sounds like the start of a great joke. Even better- the American is a Jew and the Australian a Christian. Last night when I was about to go bed (at 8.30pm - what a party animal) I meet one of my roomies. She asked "do you have a jumper or something?". I was confused. It turned out she wanted something to cover her laptop up with. The reason was she didn't have a key to our room, and couldn't afford a locker because both require you pay a deposit and she told me she didn't have the €5 for that because she had run out of money because of unexpected bank charges when withdrawing cash here. It took me a long time to work this out because her English wasn't great. I told her to leave her laptop in the room, and that I had mine in there too. Then she told me about all little mishaps that had occured in her travels, catching the wrong trains, getting fines for not buying a ticket, moving from her hotel to the hostel & how her rabbi was sorting out the bank issues for her back in the USA. And how she needed to buy Coke and in the US coke only cost $.95 but here it was €2! I wondered why she was going to spend money on coke when she had told me she couldn't afford a room key. It was a bizarre conversation. She eventually left to find her dinner.

I was left confused. I wasn't sure if she was telling the truth - in which case I should have offered to give her money or hire a locker for her. Or if she was scamming me and trying to see if I would give her money, in which case I didn't want to giver her money or hre a locker for her. If she told that story to everyone each day of her travels & people kept being generous she'd never need to buy anything. I didn't give her money. I did wait til she left then went and hired a locker for my own laptop and wallet. I hoped she would have enough to eat then I went to sleep. When I woke this morning (@ 4.30am - that will teach me for going to bed so early!) I saw she had sourced a bottle of Coke which she had by her bed (& later at 5.30 had a sip of when she woke up...surely not condusive to good sleep or health, but she did get fall back to sleep...)

I'm not sure if distrust of others is the best way to approach life - but it's easier, and when travelling I always inch up the distrust knob a little more. I must be more ethnocentric than I like to think, or perhaps it's just healthy precaution. Better to be safe than sorry!...but I wonder if Jesus would have lived by that proverb...