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.

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.

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.

Caught a cab at the gate of a us airbase in south Korea and asked the guy to take us to Starbucks.

Dude says “no problem”, and drives us all the way across the city to an obscure little strip mall with a gigantic sign that said Starbox.

It had a coffee shop, so it worked out, but I still say “starbox” instead of Starbucks decades later :)

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.

When I was stationed in Korea some mates and I accompanied a local we worked closely with to Lotte World in Seoul. Our group was mixed: two women, three guys for us Americans and our Korean friend brought along another coworker we weren’t familiar with, but ended up becoming fast friends with.

Anyhoo, long story short, the ENTIRE SEOUL SCHOOL DISTRICT decided to show up that day and we were treated to the most friendly, enthusiastic kiddos we’d ever seen.

The kids would gaggle up, giggle, run over to us, say “Hi!” crisply and loudly, and run back to her friends, laughing the whole time.

I hardly remember the rides, but I will never forget seeing those young school kids just having the times of their lives.

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 :)

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 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.

Got “mugged” in Amsterdam.

It was our last day in the city and had our backpacks on walking around like tourists in the wrong part of town. A crackhead saw us walking towards him and he stood up, pulled something out of his pocket and then walked directly into me. 100% on purpose.

He then very dramatically threw what I now knew was a crack pipe against the alley wall and yelled at me, “You stupid fucking American. You broke my crack pipe. You owe me crack! There was $15 worth of crack in that pipe!” I wasn’t having any of that, this was obviously a setup. I was about to kick his scrawny crackhead ass when he pulled out a tiny, I mean tiny little pocket knife at which point my buddy started laughing his ass off. Right before I was about to knock the hell out of this guy, one of the locals came up pulled on my collar whispered in my ear, “Just throw some change on the ground. You’re a foreigner. You will be the one to go to jail.”

I thought that was reasonable so I pulled about 75 cents worth of euros out of my pocket and threw it on the ground. At that point the alleged mugger got into a huge fist fight with about five other crackheads while they fought over the change I threw on the ground. They completely forgot about me and my friend so we just walked away. What was really funny was later that day we were in a different part of the town near the train station waiting for our train to the airport. That same motherfucker walks by looking for a target and I had to think real long and hard about what I was going to do. In the end I said fuck it and just left it alone.

On that same trip we went through Luxembourg. We were looking at the sites and there’s this big valley in the middle of the city with a park at the bottom and we were standing on this bridge filming and this guy just jumps off and falls at least 100 maybe 200 ft to his death. Me and my friend are freaking out and cannot believe we just saw somebody kill themselves. We are yelling for help and some guy who obviously lived there casually walks up and tells us, “First time here? This happens all the time. Luxembourg is a very fucking depressing place to live.” Then he just casually walked on. We couldn’t believe that shit. It was so run of the mill everyday business, nothing for these people. Just another guy had thrown himself off the suicide bridge. No biggie.

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?”

And he just says, “You go. Go!”

I’ve never run so fast in my life.

Placeholder comment because I need to go back to sleep. Someone remind me and I’ll tell y’all about rescuing my brother from a maybe kidnapping in Mexico.

Okay, so, me and my brother visited Mexico. It was a fairly small town, not a major place like Cancun. Had an amazing time. Ended up meeting these two bartenders that we became friends with. Their boss, who legit made everyone he met call him El Jefe, would come by and steal their tips and get drunk. We were there for a week. On the last night, I’m on the other side of the town (10 minute walk away) trying to seal the deal with this dude I’d met, and my brother was at the little bar hanging with our bartender friends. I get a call from him, panicked, as he whisper yells that El Jefe asked him to come with him to another bar he owns. He’s in the car, El Jefe is flying down the street, he’s doing cocaine off the dash. Please come get him at this other bar. He sends me one of those location pins that update in real time.

I tell dude that I’ll help him finish later, and take off to rescue my brother. He’s only like 5 minutes away, and has stopped moving. I go into the club, and start looking for him, but he’s not there. I’m asking folks if they’ve seen him, and trying to get closer to his pin. Finally, I find his phone, there’s some random ass dude who has it, and when I tell him I’m gonna need that phone, he tries to act like it’s his. I explain to him it’s my brother’s. He acts like he’s gonna swing at me, so I drop El Jefe’s name. That, combined with the fact that he’s 5’nothing and I’m 6’3 and near 300 pounds convinced him of the error of his ways. He gave me the phone, and I moved on in my search. I talked to the bartender, who explained that El Jefe had been there a few minutes ago, and had left some coke for me because my brother told him I was meeting them there (neither I nor my brother do coke). I asked could he tell me where they were headed. He gave me an address about a mile away. I took off.

I arrive at the house, by this point it is nearly 2 in the morning. It looks like just a house, but the lights are on so I knock on the door. I am greeted by a woman with the largest breasts I have ever seen in real life. They’re enormous. And she’s topless. Now, I don’t speak Spanish. I know enough to ask where the bathrooms are, and (I smokes at the time) where I could smoke at. Other than that, it was Google translate and gesturing for me.

However, I did not need Spanish to understand that this woman was a prostitute, and was very keen on the young American in front of her (or, at least his wallet). I tried to explain I’m trying to find my brother, but she wasn’t having it. Grabbing at my crotch, trying to pull me into one of the bedrooms off the (very nicely decorated for a brothel) living room. As my actions at this moment were less Liam Neeson and more Jerry Stiller, I decided to just come clean with her with one of the only Spanish words I knew “yo soy Mariposa!”

Now, I know that’s a slur, and I’m sorry if it upsets anyone. But at the time, it was the only thing I could think of. An hour before hand, the phrase had been… Relevant.

It was like a magic spell. Her entire attitude changed, and she was finally able to listen to my words. Once we cobbled together enough Spanglish to understand each other, I gave her the coke from the club as a thanks, and headed off to find my brother where she told me El Jefe had taken him next.

I arrive back at the night club I’d gotten the coke from, and I see El Jefe’s car this time. It’s parked in an alley behind the club, against an outdoor stair case. I go up the stairs and open the door to a private little fucking rave on the top floor of the club. They’ve got their own bar up here, and if I remember correctly, you can’t get from one floor to the other from within the club.

I see them at last! My brother looks mortified, trying to get to the entrance, and keeps getting pulled back by El jefe, and El jefe dancing with fucking scar face levels of coke on his face. It’s insane. I go up to them, and El jefe is all excited to see me, asks if I want some more coke, do I wanna party, he has a pretty boy all picked out for me if I want.

I tell him no thanks, we’ve gotta go. He gets pissy and says I’m being rude, stay and party. I tell him we’re leaving, and before I can react, he swings at me in all hiscoke fueled glory, completely missing me by a country mile. I stand up and tower over this man and explain we have a plane to catch in the morning. He finally let us go, and we head out.

Our plane the next day was delayed, so we ended up spending two more days there. In that time, El Jefe apologized for swinging at me, and gave us a tour of some of the apartments he rents.

We still keep in touch on Whatsapp, and he invites us to his enormous birthday party every year. He also says he’ll rent me an apartment there if I want to do private security for him. He talks to my brother more than me, though. He really liked him, and he calls me El Gigante. He really, really wants us both to come work for him. From what I gather, he basically runs the entire town we were in.

On my first trip to the UK, we booked into a hotel recommended to us by local friends. The room had “Shower en Suite”, which we assumed was a bathroom en suite with a shower (in contrast to one with a bathtub).

When we entered the (fairly large) hotel room, there was a blue plastic booth like one of those festival toilets in the middle of the room. It was the shower, and you had to insert coins to actually get hot water. No actual bathroom at all, just the plastic shower in the middle of the room. The toilet was a shared, ultra-small room halfway down the stairs. And lacking toilet paper. “The owner did not buy any” was the reason given by the staff.

The breakfast was interesting, too: You only got either this or that of common English breakfast stuff - either Toast, jam, and marmelade or fried egg, sausage, and beans. Either orange juice or half a grapefruit, etc. No buffet like about any other place offered.

That was quite an awkward situation for our friends who had recommended that hotel - based on their own experience 40-50 years ago. I assume it was one of the better places then.

I was in Germany working on a cruise ship that was being finished up in the Bremerhaven dry dock when I was 19, it was after work and a bunch of us went out and got drunk as we did and while coming back after all our fun, we passed by a roll-up door that had “einfahrt” painted in huge block letters on it. One of the people in our group looks at it, points at yells “I fart too, but I don’t brag about it!”

Definitely the highlight of the trip.

I also remember hanging out at the bar that was on the docks having dinner and some of the other people on my ship were trying to ask where the bathroom was and the waitress and bartender didn’t understand a single way they were putting it until the guy was like “Ok, I’m sorry this may be a little crude but it’s the only way left I know how I might ask… Where can I take a scheisse?” Turns out they call it “water closet” (bathroom is just labeled “WC”) and that was the one term none of us had ever heard before.

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.