You meet a lot of people in Europe. From married women in a Czech pub to Danish chicks on a Berlin pub crawl to Dutch people in Amsterdam. It’s times like these when I realize not how small this world is (like everyone seems to suggest). Hell, if anything my last week proved to me that this world is way too fucking big for one man to see it all. Not saying I won’t try.
About my last week: I had reading week which of course means go to Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam and don’t read a damn thing. Needless to say, it was one of the highlights of my time in Europe. If you haven’t been to Prague, in particular, you’re missing out on about 43 percent of what life has to offer. Trust the numbers, don’t think about it.
But back to this large world:
I met this Aussie in Berlin on a walking tour. We became pretty good friends for the next couple hours, talking about our travels and how cold it was (hadn’t felt Chicago-style cold in ages). I got to learn about his life as a graphic designer and he got to learn about how I dri—I mean how I’m a student at Northwestern — point is we’ll never see each other again.
Same goes for the aforementioned married women in Prague. I became the best of friends for all of 10 minutes with one in particular, before her husband came in and gave me the gaze of death. But who knows, had she not given me a false number, I’m sure we coulda hit it off for a night…
You put your drinks together, swear to be best friends, bonded by this one random-ass moment in some random-ass bar. You say something like, “I’ll totally visit you in Copenhagen, you gotta show me the Danish way!” and she’ll say something like, “Not until you give me a proper tour of Chicago, I need to see America!” And then you forget it happened.
But what if (in my case) you do remember. The married women in prague? The Danish girl in Berlin? What would happen if we saw each other again? If one them walked into this Starbucks right now, you think they’d remember too? Odds are this world is too big for me to find out. I kinda like it like that.
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