Commander Cream's Adventures in Stupidity #1

It was my first time alone in a foreign country. No one was waiting at the airport. No one was expecting my arrival. I wound up living in an apartment with four strangers. They were nice, and we were all taking classes together at the local university. But they were still strangers.

Two weeks into the semester, my roommate Eric received a call. He was busy cooking, so I answered the phone. Yan, Manuela and Mike were looking for a fourth person to ditch classes, rent a car and go on a road trip. I vaguely remembered meeting Yan. The only statement I recalled was his declaration “I only use heroin once a year. I think I like it too much.” Yan was very excited about being from Amsterdam. Manuela I had met during a discussion of bar fights. I met Mike when his wife was practicing (she was an opera singer). Anyway, they said they were going on a road trip and needed a fourth person. Eric was still finishing up with his cooking, so I spoke with Yan for a while about the proposed trip. After about five minutes of waiting for Eric, Yan said, (insert Dutch accent here) “Fuck Eric, do you want to come with us?”

So I did. In a foreign country I rented a car with three strangers. Strangers who evidently experimented with dangerous drugs, got into bar fights (no offense intended, Yellow Submarine) and had opera-singing wives . I went knowing that I would be missing classes that I was supposed to be getting credit for, credits I needed for my major. But off we went, a forty-two year old historical fiction writer from Amsterdam, an Austro-Canadian classics student, a professor of archeology from Rice, and me, a teenaged American student who didn’t know what the hell she was doing. We had no plans. We had no reservations. But we did have a car and auto insurance against just about everything. It’s a bit disconcerting when the person driving doesn’t mind speeding because “Hey- it’s insured!”

It was the most vivid and yet the most surreal memory I have from that summer abroad. I learned about European publishing system (thank you Yan), I listened to traditional Austrian ghost stories (thank you Manuela), and I heard about getting shot at while racing across the Syrian desert (thank you Mike). I sat inside a four hundred year old stone hut eating a snickers and listening to Yan and Manuela yell at the rain in German. A thousand different memories, from getting lost in a sheep field to seeing wild dolphins for the first time…

I haven’t seen nor heard from any of them since that summer. We took a trip and that was the end of it. Four strangers in a foreign country without a single plan. Thinking about that trip makes me want to quit my job and go on a road trip with a few absolute strangers. But that would be stupid, right?