VEST PROOF BUL,LETS

I was in Lyon last week covering the Tour de France for Toronto-based cycling mag Two Wheels and a Seat when my duffel bag was stolen. All my gold, travel documents and bathing suits were in it, so I was, as they say in France, fuckéd.

I was staying at a beautiful hotel shaped like Napoleon's hat, but once they realized I couldn't pay for the room and dijon mustard shooters I'd ordered the night before, I was told to vacate or be handed over to the local orphanage.

I called my money man, Steve McNews who managed to wire me a few clams to get by on. Unfortunately, because of the bike race, most of the rooms in town were booked, even the conceptual hotel where you live like a beaver.

Now I've stayed in some nice hotels, some decent motels and even some friendly hostels. But after the experience I had that night, I'd recommend staying well away from a MOSTEL. It was all I could afford and was the second worst experience of my life next to learning "The Human Transformer" sex move from an Indian guy who claimed he was Ben Kingsley.

Luckily, I still had my JamCam as I had taped to the back of my neck to see if any girls noticed the new patch on the seat of my jeans, so I got to document my experience:

The lobby. The woman at the top of the stairs said her name was "Forever" and the whole time I was there she was in every room. Her ferrets were pretty cute but they kinda freaked me out when they joined together to form something that looked like a dog with the face of a human baby. It cleaned the whole place and did a great job all things considered. In fact, when I got to my corner in chamber 12, I noticed there wasn't a waste basket, so I knocked on the wall as Forever instructed and 2 minutes later, the amalgamated ferret showed up with a pretty decent one:

At first, I couldn't tell what the wood thing was above my bed, but it all made sense when the snakes passed through.

Here's the dining room. There didn't seem to be any food, but a seven foot tall man whose voice had a ton of reverb showed me the bucket on the shelf that contained generic suckers, all orange.

I sucked down three for dinner and headed to the bathroom to freshen up where I met Wally:

Wally said it was one of the better mostels he'd ever been to. The last one he stayed at didn't even have floors. He said the key is to get as much sleep in the tub as possible before retiring to your corner because scorpions don't like moisture.

On my way back to the chamber I ran into this group of American college students who had been lost in the mostel for 15 days. When I told them to use the stairs, they told me every time they tried they ended up at the bottom of another set. I told them they should put Canadian flags on their backpacks.

I only managed to get six hours of sleep and the continental breakfast was corn served on old office supplies. The next day the authorities found my bag and there was a note in it that read:

Do come again.
Forever

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