hostile hostel part II

For the newcomers:
I'm terrible at planning and moved to San Francisco back in 2008 without a clue, and without a home.  After a few days at the impeccably weird Marin Headlands Hostel, I found a two night cancellation at the Pacific Tradewinds hostel in the city.  It was right in the middle of Chinatown! Score!  My body was alive with excitement!  I was living in the city now, just like I had planned!  I was unstoppable!
STOP.
I won't bore you with the fiasco of finding a safe place to store my car which was loaded with all of my earthly possessions on the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown, which is famous for dirty restaurants, street trinkets, and David Lo Pan, and NOT for safe places to be alone after dark.
If there is one critical thing SF is lacking, its space.  Humans, restaurants, brothels, bodegas, and the like are crammed haphazardly into increasingly tiny places for exorbitantly large amounts of money.  The Pacific Tradewinds hostel is no different. 
It consists of two floors, the first being a common room situation with a kitchen and sitting area, the second being a long hallway of sleeping decks with no separation betwixt them all, and huge locking rubbermaid containers to store your belongings in.  Weird, but not overwhelmingly so.  It's a hostel, it's in the heart of the city, I'm destined for greatness and I don't give a shit about whether or not some dude can watch me sleep or use a boxcutter to steal the only pair of jeans I own.
The man at the check in desk is an unreasonably attractive New Zealander ( I KNOW!) who explains to me the ins and outs of places I should avoid while looking for permanent housing.
Did I mention that whilst hostel hopping I was actually looking for a place to live and also had started my new full time job?  Well, I was.
Fatigued, frustrated, a little more than depressed, definitely weirded out, but somehow still intoxicated with the romance of it all, I plopped down on the couch to dine on an extravagant meal of peanut butter and saltine crackers (my only source of sustenance for the past week and a half, it would continue to get me through for at least another month).   I met a lovely German girl who was learning English, and had been instructed to read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as part of her lessons.  Have you read it?  If you have, you know it's a terrible way to learn English.  If you haven't, congratulations, that's a good 72 hours of life you have that the rest of us don't.  Trying to explain religious allusions and the complexities behind the beginnings of the American Civil War to a German foreign exchange student was about as much fun as it sounds, so we gave up and asked hot New Zealand man to suggest something better to do.
A group of upstanding young gentlemen invited us on their pilgrimage to a bar around the corner called "Shanghai Kelly's".  Racism is still funny!  But only to me.
What do you need to know?  The bouncer at Shanghai Kelly's is a 6 foot tall transvestite with a baseball bat and platform heels that Elton John would lose it over.
Welcome to San Francisco, you made it, girl.

I stayed at Pac tradewinds for the one other night before miraculously finding an opening at the fancy hostel in fishermans' wharf.   For the next 5 or 6 days I was able to sneak in on a cancellation every morning and enjoyed their free parking, continental breakfast, social gatherings, and rooms with doors. 
After that I moved to the Green Tortoise, back in North Beach/ Chinatown for two nights before resigning back to the Marin Headlands Hostel where I stayed for another week or so. 
At this point, I was smelly, exhausted, lonely, and frustrated, and jumped at the first successful housing offer that came my way.  Hint: it lasted 3 hours.
To be continued!