I was in Salzburg back in 95 with a HS exchange program. We were traveling around and having a great time. That day we went up to the castle kinda near closing time. The entry booth was unmanned so our group walked on in.
We walked around, saw lots of the castle and the views over the city were enchanting. Most of our group left, but about six of us were still in the castle later. It turns out they close and lock the main gates once all of the tourists are out. Since we didn’t get tickets in, we apparently went uncounted and got locked inside.
On my my buddies came running up to me as I was sitting on a battlement being morose (summer fling issues) and declared with alarm “we’re locked in!” so I jogged to the gate with him.
This is pre cell phone and we weren’t great at German. I told him to rally the rest of our stragglers and stood by the gate to think of how to get out. As the group was walking down the path to me, I heard keys jangling outside the gate.
After a moment the smaller postern door opened. Standing outside was a kid about 13 years old with a sack of groceries. I said entschuldigung and blocked the door open. Our group all piled out through the gate and ran off down the road while the kid just stood there looking shocked.
That was the first time I accidentally got locked in a castle in Europe. They’re remarkably effective at keeping people both in and out, both are issues I’ve had to deal with at various times.
Not as often as I’d like, but it’s happened a few times in my roaming the world.
I also had this short stint as an illegal immigrant in the UK. No one (not even me) noticed that my passport was expired before I entered the country. The dumb part was that it was noticed as I tried to fly home, but my home country changed the rules a couple of weeks before then to only allow valid passports back. So… I couldn’t immediately go home and I didn’t have a valid visa in the UK.
In an unrelated face, did you know that embassies often close at 3pm? That’s really early when you’re racing from Heathrow on the Tube and around London trying to get a valid passport for a flight the next day.
So I’m walking around a bazaar in Nepal. I got kids following me everywhere begging for money. Out of nowhere a Nepalese guy wearing a ripped up shirt comes running up and starts slapping kids and yelling at them. The kids run off and the man starts cozying up to me.
He starts asking where I’m from and follows me around for a while. Finally he cuts the foreplay and asks if I “smoke hashish”. I say yeah and we talk about that a while. He asked where I was staying and I told him Hotel Yak and Yetti. He says he’ll come by and smoke with me.
So, at the time he was supposed to show up I’m in the lobby when a hotel worker comes over and says that someone is looking for me. I walk outside and the dude is now wearing a tailored suit and is motioning for me to get in a cab.
Alarm bells go off, but fuck it you only live once. I get in the back of the cab with the guy. He has a pack of cigarettes where he emptied out the tobacco and filled them with weed. He says his cousin is the driver. We ride and smoke. I got so fucken high.
Then he’s like hey buy the rest of this pack from me. I was like dude I don’t have much money. He’s asks if I have some clothes that don’t fit. I’m 6’2” this guy was like 5’. But I’m like yeah and gave him 2 pairs of jeans.
Then I had to flush the weed because I was getting on a plane to Tibet the next morning. Staying in a Chinese prison wasn’t on my itinerary. So I had to leave the weed behind.
I have no idea, but looking back on it this is my guess. I was 18 at the time. I am like I said 6’2” which is way taller than most people there. I am white and at the time had long hair that was done in Bo Derek micro braids.
My guess is he moves weight in weed and hash. He saw some guy looking like a hippy from the US and decided to feel me out. They were super nice.
While in Japan, i once saw two fuzoku girls (which are basically light-prostitutes, they give “special” massages or baths to people) waiting outside a massage parlour at night, then some old dude passed them, and they went crazy and screamed “Wait! wait! wait! dont you want a massage?” and wouldnt let him go.
He just kept on walking with a serious look on his face, and not looking at them, he looked like Patrick Bateman walking around in his workplace with his headset, that kind of serious look.
One of the funniest, my wife majored in British literature in college. She’s read all major works, reads Shakespeare for fun, and can read and speaks middle English. I worked and traveled to England a few times a year and had lived there in my early 20s, before we met.
For our fifth anniversary I took her to England. It was her first time ever leaving the US. In fact the first time she left the southern US.
We’re standing at the curb at Gatwick waiting for a cab and there are two guys behind us talking. My wife leans over and whispers, “what language are they speaking?”
I just started laughing, and explained they were speaking English, they are just Scottish. All that book learning and studying of the language couldn’t prepare her for the Scottish accent.
I was out camping in Slovenia with the scouts. We stayed in podljubelj and met an older guy (friend our campground owner, important for later) that did tours through the redstone mines and abandoned buildings in the mountains. The tour was to take 3 hours and it cost €15 cash only, so we did a quick calculation of how much we needed and got it from the atm just before the tour started.
We had a great time and got some cool memories climbing down a abandoned mineshafts and lifts while this guy was terrified for our lives😅 So the tour concludes and we go to pay him, and he almost fell over backwards when we handed him €200 which was the price we calculated + a small tip.
Turns out the €15 wasn’t per person but instead a flat rate no matter the group size. Fucking €15 for guiding a group of 12 idiots for 3 hours.
We ended up having intense negotiations with the guy for how much he was willing to take. In the end we managed to convince him to take €100 from us and we ended up giving the other €100 to our campground owner who would make sure his stubborn friend didn’t turn down “free” money.
I still can’t believe that tour was meant to be just €15
I know, I’m just providing a example to show the disparency between economic of two different countries, where as for one person the amount is minimal while for the other is significant.
(Solvenia also uses Euro, so I don’t know whats going on over there)
My family went to Tijuana when I was about 5. My brother and I saw an unconscious/dead person being dragged into an alley and were ‘wtf?’. My parents just said uh, nevermind about that.
Went to New York city to go see Ozzy in concert (from Canada). My first time in the US. It was me and 3 other male friends, all in our mid/late 20’s. On our way back home we got pulled over by a state trooper because my friend was speeding.
The state trooper walks up to the window and says he smells marijuana. Which was total bullshit because this was a new car and we aren’t dumb enough to bring that shit with us. He proceeds to make us all stand in the cold for 45 minutes while he goes through the entire contents of the car and finds nothing. They give us a warning then leave with all our shit just laying around.
This was like a month before they legalised weed in Canada so we figured that was why they did it. The entire time I was just scared they would plant something. I’ve been conditioned to not trust cops due to all the shit I’ve seen online. This experience just made it worse. And we were just a bunch of white guys, can’t even begin to imagine what people of color have to deal with when it comes to cops in the US.
Youre right not to trust American cops. They’re corrupt and above the law. If you had pissed him off in any way he would have certainly planted something and arrested you. He searched your car because your ages and destination. He wanted to find something.
I went to Austria for skying, flew to Innsbruck and two days later caught the train to go to the ski resort.
That train was basically an intercity train (which even stopped at the little town from where a pretty regular commuter could be caught to the little ski resort) … which just so happen to be coming from some city in Switzerland and would end in some city in Germany.
So I sit down in one of those places with 2x2 seats and a table in the middle. A couple of guys also seat down there and eventually we starting chatting.
It turns one of those guys was an Italian surf promoter, who had actually been to my country (Portugal) as part of surf events in Ericeira (big surf place nowadays thanks to the almost unique massive tube waves it gets at certain times in the year).
The guy did not spoke Portuguese but could speak several other languages. We ended up having a one hour or so conversation and as my German was a bit so-so (and, let’s be honest, because it just felt cool to do so), we ended up doing with in the several languages we had in common - German, Spanish, Italian, English and French - just sort of jumping from language to language as we couldn’t remember a word in one so used a different one or because the 3rd guy only spoke English and German so we had to switch to one of those when including him.
Coming from a very peripheral country in Europe - Portugal borders only Spain, and if you travel about 1000km in Spain, you get to the only other country it has a land border with, France, and then it takes another 1000km or so of France to get to the rest of Europe - the whole “absolutelly regular train that just happens to cross 3 countries” and casually chatting with somebody and using various languages when they happen to be convenient, thing was the first time I really felt a hint of what it is to just normally be European in Europe.
Fun stories like this remind me why my country (UK) just never feels connected to Europe. We’ve got this amazing continent on our doorstep but the poor state of our language education prevents many from feeling comfortable to explore it. I would love to share a story like this.
Yeah, I was living in the UK at the time and in that sense it feels almost as peripheral when it comes to Europe as Portugal.
Living in the UK actually made this feeling in that train in Austria more intense for me because I was actually living in an European country other than my homeland but it still didn’t feel much closer to the rest of Europe than in Portugal, though I did jump on the Eurotunnel Express once in London for a couple of days in Paris, which was nice and is definitelly beyond what can be done in Portugal (were international train connections abroad are so bad that for example Lisbon - Barcellona is at least half a day, probably more).
Then again there is a little extra distancing in the UK because English being the lingua franca of this age, Britons can seldom speak any other language, and it’s not at all the same thing when you’re somewhere to use it as it is being able to speak the same language as the locals. (Mind you, I suspect I wouldn’t get the same feeling in Eastern Europe as in that experience in Austria, simply because I cannot speak any language at all from those language branches, except for Romanian which is a Latin language so I can more easilly guess the meaning of words).
We were visting my girlfriend’s family in Slovakia. Her cousin, who is an airline pilot, was also visiting at the same time and he spend his vaccation flying a small single prop plane to drop of parachutist at a small local airport. Really small. The runway literally was a just a field of gras. However it does have a MiG-21 flighter jet just causually chilling next to it. No fence or anything, it’s just sitting there next to the road.
Anyway, so wie visited the small airport and watched my GF’s cousin for a few hours. After he was done dropping all the parachutist, he still had a little fuel left, so offered to give us a little joyride, which we accepted.
Now I’m not sure if thats the standard for small planes used for the described purpose, but that plane was completly empty. There were the two pilots seats and behind that just … empty plane. No seats, no handles. It was a bit odd, but I didn’t think much about it … until we took off … with the DOOR OPEN. So we cowered as far away from the door, trying to hold on to anything.
Eventually her cousin turned arouned, smirked and laughed and eventually closed the door. The flight was a lot more enjoyable after that.
I was thirteen, visiting Ireland with my parents. We were staying in a hostel somewhere in the area of the cliffs of Moher.
My parents went out for a drink in the pub and met another Dutch couple. They were staying at the same hostel. At breakfast they joined our table and my parents introduced me.
Now I do have a very uncommon first name (the only way I’m part of the 1%). This guy says 'i once met a bit by that name before, it was in Croatia, some ten years ago.
Turns out that was me. The guy had helped dive up one of my swimming shoes that had sank to the bottom of the bay, an act of heroism for the very young me.
So we met this bloke twice, in two very different parts of Europe. The bizarre thing though: if I had a slightly more common name we might never even have known.
My brother traveled to New Zealand and met another Germans there. After talking a bit they discovered they were from same city, the same district in the city … and the same street. He randomly met our neighbour from 2 houses down on the other side of the world.
Uncannyly I have a similar story. When I was in the African country of Benin, I met a Dutch couple, one of which was an architect who studied African architecture.
My home town has a museum on that exact subject, so I asked him if he knew that, he was like ‘of course, we live in that town’
Turned out he lived around the corner of where I lived.
Was in Ireland a while back and I hit a guy with my rental car. Just a love tap. Nothing serious and no one was hurt. I was pulling out of a lot and it was really hard to see and I was looking for traffic and inching (centimetering?) out. And I look and there’s suddenly a bloke there, getting pushed a little. He smacks the hood of the car and yells something, then waves his hand at me and keeps walking.
Yeah litigation is no joke. It’s wonderous to see the lengths people go to to get one up over somebody else. I think it has to do with the lack of social security or something.
I was in the US Air Force and stationed in England. In the military you use your social security number (SSN) for pretty much everything. There was a girl I worked with whose SSN shared the same first 8 digits as mine. Turns out we were born in the same hospital a few hours apart, but never met until we were in our 20s in a foreign country.
For non-Americans, the first 3 numbers are assigned by the geographical region. Then the next 2 numbers are a smaller grouping inside of that area. So, two people born in the same small geographic area have a good chance of having the same first 5 digits the same. In my case it was the first 8 that were the same. They are only 9 digits long.
I was in Ibiza with some friends (we met famous drug smuggler Howard Marks in Manumission, but that’s not the point of this story). One night two of us were out in San Antonio town, and on the way back to our hotel we spotted a mannequin outside a clothes shop. It was clearly bin collection day the following day, so obviously they didn’t want it any more and clearly we could, indeed we must take it back to our hotel room and put it on the balcony. So we picked it up and walked back towards the hotel. I’m in front holding it across the shoulders, my mate behind me holding the legs. We’re walking past bars and everyone is laughing and cheering us (drunk British people, we’ll cheer anything out of the ordinary).
Then the police turn up in a van. You hear horror stories about being taken to the police station which is miles away and having to pay hundreds in fines, so I instantly become sober. One of them opens the back of the van and says, “In, in.” So we put the mannequin in. In fear and trembling I ask, “What about us?”
Did a school exchange with Serbia once (am German myself). The abundance of guns was jarring, I was welcomed to a night club by a couple armed bouncers, one of them open carrying a fucking ak-47.
Those mfs thought it hilarious to put a gun in my jacket during the security check, it was totally surreal being yelled at and held at gun point, even though they were just fucking with me.
I remember after 9/11 I took a flight out of Minneapolis and there were security/police/whatever with automatic rifles. Pretty surprising as I’d never seen anything like that in the US.
I was on a high school trip to Poland in the 90’s. It was an eight day trip through the country, including a couple of days of kayaking. Our school was definitely on a tight budget to make this trip work, so we spend our nights in a bunch of cheap hotels and camping grounds.
One luxury that we were always missing out on was decent toilet paper. The only toilet paper supplied was this single ply stuff with the same texture as sanding paper. So when we were out for an evening in Warsaw I visited a five star hotel to enjoy some quality bathroom time. This was several days in and I really wanted to enjoy using a toilet in a heated and clean environment. And it was so nice! No smells, no cold drafts and the toilet paper! So soft! I was in heaven :)
As luck would have it, the bathroom stall had a whole stack of these magically soft toilet rolls. On an impulse I stuffed all of them (around six if I remember correctly) under my coat and smuggled them out of the hotel. Back at the camp I shared them with the rest of my classmates, bringing back a little bit of luxury in our dreary little place. Never been that popular in my life :)
My mom’s friend was nearly pickpocketed in front of the Trevi Fountain by a man with two thumbs on his right hand. My mom caught him with his hand in her purse and made a big scene. He ran away.
I was 11 years old and had my camera out and ready and it kills me that I didn’t get a photo of his hand.
Heh, my thought too, but it wasn’t like an extra pinky. He had two thumbs stacked on top of each other. I don’t know where they joined, but I could see the pad of one thumb on top of the nail of the other.
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