Waking Up In Belgium

So, the year was 2007. We had just graduated high school days before my friend’s 18th birthday. We celebrated our completion of 12 horrible years and my friend’s birthday by backpacking around Europe.

Three days into the trip, on my friend’s actual birthday, I decided to seal the deal by buying him a few beers at a pub. The first round came and we took those easy. The second round came, once again, we were champs. This continued for quite some time and things got a little fuzzy after round 6 or 7.

My next coherent memory comes to me, hundreds of miles away. My friend wakes me up outside a train station in Brussels, Belgium. 16 hours had passed since I lost contact with reality and passed out. Neither of us knew how we’d arrived in Belgium. We didn’t remember a single thing from the night before. After a few minutes of recollection, we realize that we had been robbed while we were passed out on the train. We were left stranded thousands of miles from home with nothing but 4 euros in our pockets and the clothes on our bodies. Everything else had been stolen. Not only were we stranded, but we began to feel pain. Our faces and knuckles were cut. Neither of us remember what happened there either.

We decided to find a pay phone and phone our friend in London that we had met at our hostel. After twenty minutes on the phone, we learn what had happened the night before. After numerous rounds of beer, things started to get rowdy. My friend apparently started flirting with a local gal. Her boyfriend didn’t like that and after arguing, things turned into an all out fight. A few other guys from our hostel and I jumped in to help my friend, who was being ganged up on. After being thrown out of the pub, the girl (who was angry at her boyfriend), came with us and said we should get out of the city.

We drunkenly listened to her and boarded a train to Brussels. Our next memory was waking up in Brussels with nothing to our names. The girl had stoled all of our belongings while we were passed out and there was no sign of her anywhere.

I will NEVER get hammered in a foreign country again!