Back in the late 1970s friend and I decided to hitchhike through Europe - we were living in London. We got zero rides from Calais and ended up catching a train to Paris, arriving at nearly midnight. The hotels near the station were too expensive, and we were sitting in the gutter looking at a map when a young man asked if he could help.

He said he knew where there were cheaper hotels, and offered to walk us there. He was charming, funny and warm, and we had a great conversation as we walked. After a mile or so he said, well this is crazy, why don’t you come and stay at my place? My mother won’t mind.

He took us to a grand Paris apartment, like from a film. His mother was already in bed, but she called out instructions for putting fresh sheets on the sofas. Hearing that we hadn’t eaten all day, he took us out for a meal at a couscous restaurant nearby (it was after 1am by now). He explained that he had to leave early in the morning because he taught at a school for special needs children outside the city, but that his mother would give us breakfast.

And that is what happened - she was charming and warm, and acted as if it was perfectly normal to feed two random foreigners her son had brought home in the middle of the night.

I’ve loved Paris ever since.

The first time camping with my girlfriend. We drove 25 miles down a dirt road to get to the campsite but found it was full. (We hadn’t realized that it was opening day of hunting season.) So we drove 25 miles back and started looking for a hotel. No luck after multiple tries. It was getting dark and we were tired.

The surprise? We still got along just great! Even with the setbacks we took it easy on each other and still found humor. Eventually we found a hotel room, then the next day a beautiful campsite.

So I married her.

Not to be that person…

I heard of Americans being bad travelers abroad, and just figured that it was talked up. It is not.

As an American myself, I saw so many horrid and mean people while we were traveling. Not all, mind you, but there were whole groups of people who just acted selfish, entitled, and just overall not caring about other customs.

I had one woman who was trying to use an ATM and just could not get it. Instead of casually asking for help, she screams in the ATM room “DOES ANYONE SPEAK ENGLISH?!” A poor couple behind them said “A little…” and she said “OH THANK GOD. This language…”

I had other people who just ignored customs when ordering food, or allowing people to walk around, pushing, shoving. The worst though is how they talk down to locals and their customs. Inherently they assume that different is bad, and that they are inconvenienced by having to do local custom things. Like ordering food, knowing that their pace is slower, or that their waiter isn’t going to coddle them through ordering.

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. I was shocked by it all, and felt disappointment. I also felt like I immediately understood why other countries hate us.

When I was visiting Berlin several years ago, I was walking past Hermannplatz Station to meet up with a friend for breakfast. I was on the opposite side of the street from the station entrance/elevators when I noticed some commotion near one of the elevator doors. I went over to see if everything was cool but I was horrified to find three small dogs being pulled down by their collars into the closed elevator doors. They were flailing for dear life as the elevator had started to go down to the platform with their collars still attached, which was strangling all three of them. There were people around but either they didn’t notice or didn’t know what to do. I quickly bent down to them and started digging my thumbs under the collars to pry them off and was thankfully able to get two without too much issue. But the third dog was proving much more difficult. It’s possible the elevator had gone further down in that short time. I used all of my strength to try and get the extremely tight collar off but I just couldn’t get my fingers underneath. The dog was losing strength and I stopped hearing its wheezing, desperate voice. I turned around and there were a few people behind me screaming and yelling out of horror. I don’t know German and it seemed that everyone there couldn’t speak English; I made a sign for a scissors but nobody seemed to have anything sharp. But in that moment an older gentleman quickly bent down and pulled out his pocket knife. He was thankfully able to cut the collar off for the third.

After all of that, I just sat there with these three tiny dogs all climbing into my lap shivering and still breathing heavily. I stayed with them for a bit until two police officers showed up (who also didn’t speak much english or just chose not to). The group of people that formed around the elevators were holding the dogs and I just kinda left at that point. Seeing that the dogs were good and that the police showed up and were talking to the locals, I just left to meet up with my friend. We had a nice breakfast after that.

I was in Ireland with my parents in 93. My parents had been out to the pub and met another Dutch couple that stayed at the same hostel.

At morning we joined them at the breakfast table and introduced me: ‘this is our son, x’. Now you must know that my name is quite uncommon, as in is the only way I’m in the 1%.

The guy said, I once met a bit with that name in Yugoslavia, in 84. He had helped that boy het back his swimming shoes from the bottom of the bay. That boy was me. If my name was more common we’d never have known that we met before almost a decade ago.

I was in Japan for a while a few decades ago and I would often just get on a train and go somewhere to see what I’d run into. I didn’t speak any Japanese but I did have some phrases down and a bunch more saved on my phone I could listen to repeatedly and just try to mimic them. Anyway I get turned around and it is getting late, I need to get back on a train so I can head back to where I’m staying for the night, so I ask a random guy in Japanese if he speaks English. He says yes well enough so I explain my situation and ask for direction to the nearest line that’ll get me home.

He proceeds to speak in what he must have thought was English for a solid 5 minutes. I couldn’t understand a single word he said. He pointed in basically every direction at one point or another during the monologue. And I didn’t want to be rude so I listened politely and just planned on thanking him and asking someone else if I could find anyone. But at the end of this huge long gesturing play he was putting on he said in the clearest English with absolutely no accent. “are you picking up what I’m laying down” I’d never heard that phrase before at that time and was absolutely floored. He even nailed the L in laying. I legitimately think even to this day that i was being pranked.

I asked some expat friends who had been living in Japan for a long while and they said there were tons of English phrase books and that was just probably a phrase he practiced a lot. But it was so surreal that every other utterance was so obviously not English.

I thanked the guy and found someone else who literally took me to the station themselves. But it is one of the strongest memories I have from my time there.

I got robbed by the traffic police in Ukraine. This was back in like 2007.

Got a few of these but I’ll share the one I thought was right as I read the title. Not sure it really fits, but it’s a fun story:

Was in Lanzarote with my grandma, mom, and her then fiancé about 15 years ago, when I was around 20 years old. My grandma is pretty fun and likes to have a drink so we kept sneaking away to the closest bar to wherever we were.
One day we find this tiny bar with no other people and go in, sit down and each order a Margarita. After a few minutes we hear whispering and snickering from the bar and see that the two female bartenders are looking at us and sneakily gesturing towards us as they are whispering. They take a really long time to get the drinks made, to the point where we almost got up to ask about it but we’re Swedish so it’ll take a lot to make us actually do that.

When we finally got the drinks the girl that brought them winked at me and I had no idea how to interpret that at first. Then my grandma mentions how strong the drink is after a few small sips, I reply by saying that mine is basically virgin (without alcohol) and that’s when we realize what’s happening; The bartenders thought my grandma had found some “fresh meat” and was trying to get me drunk enough to have her way with me. I was visibly nerdy and inexperienced with alcohol back then so they tried to save me from the jaws of a Cougar.

We immediately came up with the plan to visibly switch drinks and for me to chug mine and then overplay how drunk I became. It worked better than we had hoped, the girl’s eyes widened and their jaws dropped as I chugged and they kept looking over with wide eyes and their hand covering their mouths as I played more and more drunk and flirty.

After a while we couldn’t stop our laughter anymore so we let it out and told the girls that she’s my grandma. They made sighs of relief and started laughing too. When we ordered more drinks they told us they’d make them extra strong as an apology and for a well-executed show. I didn’t have to play drunk after that, had my first really bad tequila hangover the day after.

One night in 2014 I was vacationing on Bali, walking on the streets of Ubud late at night after going to get cigarettes from the Indomaret around the corner. On my way back I noticed a large group of young men sitting at a round table in front of a closed cafe joking and drinking beer. I waved and said selamat malam and was going to continue on my way when one of them called me over. He asked if I had any kretek or beer, and I actually did have a kretek, so I gave him one. He asked if I wanted to sit with them and I agreed, so I sat down, and they started drinking a large 40 of Bintang (local beer), but it was fully shared, everyone would take one sip and pass it along. We ran out of that beer and I volunteered to go get some more. They were fun guys. A couple of them worked at the cafe we were sitting in front, while a few of the others were in a band together. The reason they were there is that they were essentially conducting a wake for the guy who had asked me to sit down’s mother. I hung out with the guys for a couple of hours. They busted out their instruments and started playing some cuban music (very well) and we all got slowly drunk together. We laughed and cried together and it was just a really nice experience.

I’m going back to Bali once again next week, too. Good thing to remember right before I spend a full 24 hours traveling!

I’ve lived on the road and traveled a lot, so it’s difficult to choose.

My last stay in Japan I was jet-lagged and struggling with a konbini self-checkout machine that was broken but I didn’t know. Some kind Japanese couple patiently helped me figure it out, even through a few “wakarimasen” (“I don’t understand”) on my part. Afterward I sighed a deep “arigatou gozaimasu” (“thank you”) to them, and they smiled big at me, and walked off.

This experience and many others sealed my love for Japan and the Japanese.

Coffee, seafood and a hot tub. Not a good combo, it turns out.

Dengue. Not much detail needed, everything people say about it is true.

I spent three weeks on France (almost 20 years ago) and the only rude person I encountered was being rude to everyone. He just seemed to be generally in a cranky mood. Everyone else was somewhere between neutral and friendly. I speak some French, but my accent was bad enough that anyone who spoke English immediately switched to that.

Needing emergency documents returning home proving I don’t have COVID. While everyone needed these documents asap.

Miserable

COVID. I wore an N95 religiously everywhere indoors and have been vaccinated eight times, and distanced from people outside too, but the coughing lady on the plane was the culprit I think. Thankfully due to eight vaccines I just had a stuffy nose and loss of sense of taste and smell.