I learned the hard way the first time I ever left the United States without one single family member (an endeavor I was patting myself on the back for about a month afterwards, because my world perspective used to be so small you needed an electron microscope to see it at all) that sometimes your plans don’t come to fruition exactly as intended.
Turns out certain behaviors within the confines of my private, liberal arts college may have been accepted with minimal judgment and no consequences, but those behaviors are considered dumb as hell in the real world. Often times these certain behaviors are driven by copious amounts of alcohol, if you can believe it.
I frequently look back on my more innocent days longingly, the days before I got myself hooked on social media and became more in tune with some of the perspectives of this (at times pompous) generation, because it was a time when I had no qualms about being a walking cliché. Unless you count moving houses every couple of years, or the most bizarre moment of my life in which I somehow managed to get a piece of hair wrapped around one of my taste buds on Easter Sunday, sobbing in my tiny pink dress until my mother ripped it off and stared at me bewildered and confused, most of my childhood was nothing out of the ordinary. Even ordinary things, the things millennials, striving to be unique, will seek to discourage you from doing, were exciting to me.
A month-long trip to Europe the minute I graduated college, in between snatching up my diploma and starting my first job? No idea could be more cliché, and to me, no idea could be more perfect. And it was this cliché that began my long overdue and much needed shift in my understanding and perspective of the world.
The Incident
I began my trip in London, staying in a budget hostel in Elephant and Castle that had no air conditioning and no way to crack open the windows. The hostel itself was friendly and sociable, and I was quickly meeting people and getting into the groove of this novel and electrifying travel thing.
Woohoo! It’s London, bitches!!! Imagine the scene: I know no one, I don’t know the city, my phone is out of commission because buying an international data plan is something that simply did not cross my mind, and I’ve already started to forget how embarrassing things could get after a couple glasses of wine. So, following a long, hard deliberation, it seemed obvious that getting drunk would be the smartest, most responsible decision. Right? When in Rome, as they say. I figured I’d be in Rome in only a few more weeks, so what the hell?
I bought a ticket to participate in a hostel-hosted pub crawl in an effort to get to know my traveling companions a little better on my first night in London. It led to meeting British locals and other travelers over several hours, which quickly became a blur of dance floors, Underground rides, and incredibly revolting, albeit free of charge, licorice-flavored shots. After visiting several pubs, a few girls and I left to return to the hostel and cracked open two bottles of red wine, which we passed around, talking about boys we had met and the good ole days of sorority life.
This was just two weeks out of college, you have to understand, and having 2,000 people in my entire school, in a town whose claim to fame is being an ideal spot for truckers to pass through, made partying a habit, unless you were interested in starving yourself for entertainment.
I woke up the next morning to my phone alarm going off from under me and my bottom bunk mate throwing it up onto my mattress, the flick of her wrist conveying an exasperated attitude, my phone having slipped between the cracks and onto her bed as I attempted to sleep off my drunken stupor. I sat up quickly and thanked her profusely, hoping she would still be willing to be my friend in the days to come.
Nausea. Vertigo. Flushed cheeks. Hair so sweaty that it stuck limply and unflatteringly to the side of my head. Who knew London could be well past 90°F and so. damn. humid?
I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to leave the city that day to visit some other parts of England, but if a hangover had not stopped me from getting brunch and then frequenting the keg in the backyard of my favorite fraternity, then it wouldn’t stop me from exploring a foreign country.
Dehydration. Disequilibrium. Queasiness. I shuffled to the washroom with the idea of washing away my sins, but if that wasn’t possible, hopefully unplastering my hair from my burning hot cheeks, at the very least.
The water closet was typical of water closets in the UK, the entire room made of concrete with a single shower head in the center of the ceiling and a sink protruding from one of the walls. I turned on the faucet and twisted it until the water was scalding me, my muscles relaxing and my senses starting to wake up. I squeezed some shampoo onto my hand as the hot stream drenched my sweaty, cloudy head. “This is just what I need,” I thought. There’s nothing like a good shower to make you feel better after a night of drinking your weight in alcoholic, adult beverages.
All of a sudden, I realized I was on the floor. What? No, seriously, what? I felt incredibly woozy, unsure what had happened and why. I looked down at my hand and realized that, in my mysterious descent to the ground, I had let my shampoo wash off down the drain. A waste. I pulled myself to my feet.
“What in the fresh hell?” I asked myself. I was exceedingly maddened by my inability to, as a healthy young adult, catch myself from slipping and falling in a shower where the floor was, by nature, not at all slippery. I also could not cease reprimanding myself for letting my glob of shampoo slip away forever. There’s one fewer time I will be washing my hair this trip, I thought to myself, because I am apparently, all of a sudden, a late-onset boorish klutz. I shrugged, humming a song that had been playing at one of the pubs from the night before, and squeezed some more shampoo onto my hands, reaching up to lather it into my hair.
There I was, on the ground again. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, YOU CLUMSY LITTLE WENCH?? I blinked a few times, my vision unfocused and my mind far away, leaned over, and vomited several times onto the shower floor. One of my roommates outside asked if I was okay, her voice concerned. I laughed weakly, brushing it off. “Oh, yeah, I am totally fine. Totally fine.” I was just being startlingly uncoordinated, right? There was no other explanation for what was going on. I didn’t even know where I was. I sat on the ground for several more minutes, getting my bearings, before bagging the whole hair-washing thing and turning off the water.
Putting on my best happy face, I trudged downstairs to meet my new friends for our trip to Oxford, but I found conversation to be difficult, looking people right in the eyes to be a chore. I felt like I was floating, and ended up going to bed the minute we returned back to the hostel that evening, ignoring the fact that the sun was still shining bright outside.
It took me two days before I remembered what had happened; due to a ridiculous level of dehydration brought on by alcohol, the stuffy room, and the blazingly hot shower (don’t ask me why I would get into a steamy shower while drenched in sweat and lightheaded from thirst, because not even the lord himself could tell you), I had lost consciousness twice, dropped straight to the ground, and hit my head on both the concrete floor and the sink, as evidenced by the blinding headaches I was getting and the noticeably purple knots on several parts of my head, including in the middle of my forehead.
My notes in my travel journal from that day are incomprehensible, and I am now the proud owner of a tacky, tiger-adorned sundress from a shopping trip in Paris a few days after the incident, because moderately concussed people apparently cannot recognize kitsch when it is smacking them right in between the eyeballs.
Finally, after a bit of a mental breakdown on a river cruise on our last night in Paris, where I just felt nauseated, sick, and like I’d really like to see my mom, I told a few of my traveling companions what had happened, and we arranged to see a doctor once we arrived in Amsterdam, about a week after the initial injury. I rested myself for another week after that, refraining from staying out too late or drinking until I started to feel more like myself.
Takeaways
This is the most honest rendition of this story I’ve ever told, mostly because I was incredibly embarrassed for years and because I knew admitting that I gave myself a LITERAL BRAIN INJURY because I am an idiot and don’t know how to drink alcohol responsibly would not get me any sympathy. These are the kinds of things people, from their anonymous Twitter accounts, make comments heavily laden with snark that the injured person had this coming from the start, and that they don’t feel bad one bit. And I probably deserve that.
After being hard on myself for a while, I had to remind myself that I am human. Humans have never been perfect. Even people who have better heads on their shoulders than I did when I first started traveling on my own make mistakes, get themselves in unsavory situations, fall down and break something, or have a drink too many.
The situation was a huge wake-up call. Guess what? Drinking excessively while traveling, especially traveling alone, is a risk. There’s the risk of physically injuring yourself, and there is the risk of something even more heinous happening to you because you are inherently vulnerable if you are obviously a tourist stumbling through the streets of a foreign land (especially, unfortunately, if you are a woman).
This is not college. This is the world.
I still like getting a drink with my friends just as much as the next guy. Sometimes I’ll even have a few drinks. Yes, more than one, and even more than two. However, I have stopped drinking in any sort of excess when I travel, and I have definitely learned the importance of post-pub hydration. I am lucky that I didn’t hurt myself worse than I did, and that I was able to take this as a learning experience and grow from it as my college years get further and further behind me.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Concussions are an incredibly common injury, and I probably would not have fretted to nearly the same degree had I been comfortably at home. The fact that I was backpacking, moving around every few days, out exploring every hour of the day, and, most importantly, on my own, made it hard to deal with the injury.
The thought of going up to people I didn’t even know, telling them that I passed out butt naked in the shower and hit my head on the floor and that’s the reason I was sleeping 12 hours a day, seemed dramatic and whiny. Why was it their problem that I don’t know how to take a shower? That I didn’t know that drinking 12 gallons of liquor in a night is, perhaps, a bit much?
In this world, with all of the things you see and hear about, it is easy to think that no one will be interested in helping you. Everyone should be responsible for his or herself, after all. But I have found that travelers, an open-minded group of people, out in the world to better themselves and meet new types of people and see new types of cultures, are happy to make a friend or two along the way. The friends I made checked in on me every once in a while, and, a couple weeks later, laughed with me about how much of a massive dumb ass I am. You may be traveling solo, but you are certainly never truly on your own.
Travel insurance is your best friend.
There is no doubt that anyone who has traveled a bit will agree that protecting your trip with travel insurance is the responsible thing to do. Not only does it protect your purchase if you are unable to keep your original travel plans, but it also helps to cover you if you get seriously sick or injured on the road. I have come to realize that in general, running to see a doctor at the first sign of a throat tickle is a massive waste of money and time and usually is more unbelievably galling than anything else, but there are certainly emergency situations where there is no other choice. A broken bone or serious concussion needs medical attention, and you are not going to enjoy your trip without it. I’m pretty sure that goes without saying.
Shit happens. It is going to happen whether you deserve it or not. It is going to happen for reasons beyond your control. The world is a big, harsh, beautiful place. And travel insurance can help you in case anything does happen. My insurance covered injuries and accidents during the trip, so I was able to get reimbursed for my doctor’s visit after a filing a claim upon return to the USA. There are lots and lots of companies out there to help you find the perfect plan for your needs. Allianz is a good option if you are looking for a cheap purchase, covering up to $50,000 in emergency medical expenses and $2,000 in baggage or personal effect loss.
I have not participated in another hostel-sponsored bar crawl, and I have no plans to in the future. They are nothing but ways to cater to young tourists by getting them drunk off of cheap drinks, and there are better ways to spend your time and experience the culture authentically. I have also, I am very proud to say, not passed out in any showers since my first solo trip to Europe (I have slipped in a few, for sure, but my head, at least, remained well above the floor).
