Brussels, day 2

There are certain inevitable facts of life. One of them is that, for every three or four nights you spend sleeping in a hostel, one of them will be completely dominated by the eardrum-rupturing oral explosions of some jackass with intense sleep apnea and the lack of social consciousness that would have led him to get a single room.

There's not much you can do in this situation. You can wake the guy up every time his snores become too intense to sleep through, but it never takes more than two or three minutes for them to begin again. You can move to another room, or - as I did in Kyoto last year - carry your mattress to the lobby. Or you can seal all offending air passages with hot glue.

Around midnight last night, that last option was starting to look really good to me. Eternal damnation is a high price to pay for a good night's sleep, though, so what I ultimately did was check out of the hostel and move to a hotel down the street. I only got six hours of sleep that way, but at least they were mostly uninterrupted.

I'm completely wiped out after three nights of inadequate sleep. A fellow interpreter has offered me a spare mattress at her place for the last two nights of the fair, and I really hope I can sleep well on it. If not, I guess I can get a hot glue gun at the office supply shop and head back to the hostel.