Saturday, February 27, 2010

Remembrances of Europe...this should totally be a Survivor plot.

I had the good fortune to be able to backpack in Europe the summer after I graduated from college for an amazing 6 weeks! It was totally awesome....

Recently, the girlfriend that I went with came through town and we met for dinner and drinks.  And, of course, started reminiscing about our trip abroad.  Basically, we came to this conclusion: we should be really fucking grateful to be alive.

Really.

Because we were really stupid lucky about some things.  We took our passports, credit/debit cards, a backpack of clothes and a EuroRail pass.  And that's it.  No reservations, no plans, no nothing....just us and our dumb asses and some of our parents' money.  We flew to London, took the chunnel to Paris, hooked up with a friend and started making travel plans.

So after Paris, Barcelona and a failed attempt to go to Nice in the south of France (apparently French train conductors go on strike like once a month), we headed to a random little beach town on the Atlantic coast of Spain.  We had been on a train for God-only-knows-how-long to get to San Sebastian, Spain (which, by the way, you MUST visit should you ever get to Spain and is definitely on my list of places to revisit before I die), and we lost our reservations at the hostel we found in the travel book.  This was due to our train being delayed because of a "small fire" in the engine, which they contained while we were stopped in the middle of the Spanish desert inhaling the scent of the rarely-washed European drunkards sitting in front of us.  And no, I'm not making a blanket statement about Europeans and their drinking...one of these dudes had a case of beer in his black duffel bag under his seat.  Yes, I'm dead serious...like I've said before, you can't make this shit up. 

Anyway, so we get to San Sebastian and begin desperately trying to find a pay phone to get a room at another hostel....which were all filling up because by this point in our journey, it was June and LOTS of European and Americans were travelling.  I walk outside to find my friend and tell her I just phone-jacked some old Spanish lady and needed the number of the new place....and what is she doing?? Chatting up some hot Australian dude, of course! Um...really?!?  So come to find out, he and his brother have an apartment in the city and they are subletting rooms (illegally, of course), to backpackers.  So what do we do?? Briefly confer, decide he's really hot and we like his accent and besides, the two of us could totally take him...and then follow him to his apartment in the city.  Did I mention that it's nighttime? And we're girls?? And he could've totally had some other guy waiting in the alley behind the train station waiting to knock us out and rape us??

But he didn't.

Turns out, he was a super nice guy and we crashed at his apartment for 7-8 days of total drunken, beach town debauchery and it was flippin' awesome.

But my friend did draw the line at letting me ride from one bar to another with the hot Italian horse trainer guy on his moped.  Hey, at least we were looking out for each other, right??

My mom is convinced that she prayed me home from that trip.....I'm not so sure she's wrong.

2 comments:

  1. i would love to hear more plzzzzzzzzzzzz thanx

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  2. OOOhhhh Kylie! The good times we had! And seriously that trip taught us many life skills like laughing our asses off in Florence when some lady in front of us fell off the sidewalk, and watching out for snakes in the bushes in Florence which turned out to be HUGE RATS, and also running to our hostel in Rome before they locked the doors at night. So many good memories:)

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