Hostels come with early morning noise. It’s part of the deal. You save money; random sounds wake you up. The bunk beds squeak. Their steel ladders groan under groggy risers with full bladders. A missed rung leads to a floorboard thump. Before flights at dawn, suitcases get unzipped, checked, then zipped. Before full-day nature tours, water bottles slide into backpacks. Curses are muttered at sunscreen leak discoveries. But when a hostel noise wakes you up, you quell your anger: one morning you were or will be a hostel noise, too.

Yet, there’s still basic decency. No one’s supposed to bang around like they’re at home. There’s still awareness that bodies are asleep, and want to continue sleeping, as you do what you need to do. If you have an early flight, you put in the effort to pack the night before. If not, do it quickly and quietly. If you need to re-organize your stuff, do it in the common room.

I didn’t encounter this decency in Singaporean hostels.

The morning after scootering, I woke up to a crinkling plastic bag. When my lids unlatched, I was welcomed to the day by a woman’s crotch, which was so close I could read “LEVI’s” on the four silver buttons. The woman was stuffing shirts into a plastic bag that dangled two feet away from my formerly unconscious face. Too tired to protest, I rolled over to the other side of the stiff mattress then checked my phone. 6 AM.

After the plastic bag crinkles, there was whispering. I lifted my face from the pillow to locate the speakers. In the nook at the back of the room, seven people were assembled in a circle, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Maybe it was a prayer circle. Maybe they were planning. Whatever it was, it didn’t need to happen next to 5 sleepers at 6:15 in the morning.

The following day I moved hostels. No luck. My sleep was interrupted for good at 4 AM by two sounds. The first was snoring, and the inhaled air sounded as if it was pushing through mucus cobwebs and rotten lungs then the exhale air was accompanied by a half cup of saliva. Even more disturbing were the second set of sounds that emerged from this old and clogged oxygen machine: religious verses. The incantations were lengthy, foreign, and at varying volumes. Listening in the inky room, I was convinced the man was possessed. And when the sun started leaking in, I believed he was deploying God’s words against a nightmare.

I moved hostels again, dropping 40 bucks for a room with only three other beds. This time my shuteye was robbed by a phone alarm. The first ring, I didn’t say anything. The second one, three minutes later, I was a little annoyed. The third time, I asked, “Yo, man. How many alarms you got?” He said, “A lot,” and I laughed, thinking he was admitting his own shame. When the alarm went off again, I sat up straight. “Yo! Can you switch off your fucking alarm?” “Oh damn! Yeah, man. My bad. Sorry.”

This lack of consideration was partly caused by the advanced age of Singapore’s hostel residents. Typically, hostels are youthful. I’d come to expect drunks waking me up—not prayer circles, congested respiration, and narcoleptic alarm habits. So, it was to my surprise that most of the hostel were filled by mid-lifers who acted so comfortably that I could only assume they’d been staying for a while. Men got out the shower and displayed their protruding bellies and white hair chests until they were ready to put a shirt on. Women played news programs off their phone with no earphones as they spread out then slipped into naps on the common room couches. By the end of my Singapore stay, I almost came to respect their lack of shame. Almost.