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What is your best story when you were in a foreign country?

It can be anything: Scary, funny, confusing or embarrassing. What happened that stands out most in your mind?

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  • 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.

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