Author's Note: An instructional essay written for my English class. Enjoy!

Surviving Foreign Countries

Traveling has never been easy. Even when it is just to a neighboring state, it can still take up to five hours to make the drive and without the proper tools—iPod, DVD player, or, heaven help you, an air conditioner—that five hours can feel like a grueling marathon. If driving within the States is a minor annoyance, then international travel is the fifth circle of hell, right next to the lake of fire. I’m not just talking about the regulations, stepping through security, sifting through baggage claim, realizing you’ve lost your baggage, badgering airport officials about your lost baggage, and then perhaps never reclaiming your bags because they disappeared into Void of Unreturnable Goods—that is the 4th circle of hell. The other part of international traveling is meeting a language barrier and being easily disgusted that the natives know no English just as they are easily disgusted you did not put in the effort to learn their language. It’s ordering harmless sounding foods at the restaurant only to realize it’s nothing like an American home-style meal of steak and mashed potatoes. It’s attempting to travel transcontinentally and discovering that the only viable way of crossing into the next country is being crammed onto a train car and hoping there’s a comfortable seat in the aisle. It’s stepping into a field only to realize two minutes too late it was full of 2,000 lb Bulls. All of these dastardly situations can be avoided by following these tips to find your way out of them, should you have not heeded my warnings previously.

This is College Student Travel Extraordinaire, the girl who found herself stranded for a whole night in the no-mans-land of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Walking the entire countries of Austria and Germany were mere trifles to that harrowing night of feasting on midnight Wendy’s and forced to watch The Flintstones live-action movie—the retinal scarring is still struggling to heal. Swimming mere feet away from the head of a Giant Clam in the Great Barrier Reef and hitching trains to Florence, Italy are experiences I don’t value as that one day of total and hopeless abandonment. However, there is only so much you can do to prevent a calamity like spending the night in O’Hare—which is nothing—so a run through of other potential scenarios is in order.

The typical place where the running of the bulls is held is in Pamplona, Spain. The bulls in Germany do not treat this spectacle as a game like the Spanish bulls do, and therefore one should be advised on how to find your way out of such a situation. Unless you are the fastest sprinter on Earth, then running several hundred yards to a fence is a less than feasible option, but having a friend on hand who is usually slower than you will greatly increase your chances. If you do not have a friend or, if for some vague reason you care not to risk your friend’s life, jumping into a pond will have a similar affect at stopping the bulls. But beware of the leeches, especially the brain-eating ones. Imitating Bugs Bunny from the popular cartoon ‘Bully for Bugs’ and using any of his insults such as “What a gullibull. What a nincowpoop!” is copyright infringement and highly discouraged, but tiptoeing out of the predicament as Bugs Bunny does will guarantee safe passage out of the cow pasture. If the worst should come to worst, call Lassie. He always comes!

The rising fuel prices has forced major airlines to start charging for baggage, and unless you are into fasting it might be easier to take the train cross-continent. Unlike the airlines that have limited seating, the trains don’t mind adding a few extra cars to the end, or if they’re really strapped for money, cramming you on board anyway because you are certainly capable of standing for seven hours straight. When purchasing a train ticket always fork over the extra dollars for a reserved seat if you are really concerned about saving your legs the strain. For overnight trips, the ticket sellers may try to push a bed onto you. Do not, under any circumstances, accept this offer. Ten extra Euro is not worth being fully rested in the morning when you arrive at your destination.

A popular college getaway is getting a couple friends together and spending the last dime of your parent’s money to tour several countries. Don’t just pick two or three of your closest friends and hop onto the nearest plane; there should be a vetting process. Take someone who is clearly older than you to shift the responsibility onto them so that all complaints and stresses will be directed likewise. But this is risky for if she is an Art History major she will insist on going to every art museum within every city. As everyone knows, the first dozen or so paintings inspire polite interest, but if the experience continues for more than five minutes you are not getting enough out of it. At which point, a mutiny should be held to overthrow the original leader and another one should be put in place to direct the group to its overwhelming interest. Passing up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Wine Garden’s of Florence for any of Botticelli’s masterpieces in the Uffizi is not worth it.

Australia and New Zealand are much under-loved countries in the southern hemisphere, and if the quarterly school year is impeding you, the only months you can make it are in the dead winter. There is an upside to this since, next to Africa, both countries house the most poisonous and aggressive insects and animals in the world. For some people this can be a turn-off from such an exotic place, but when you have an infestation of Brown Recluse in your house then it’s nothing more than an aggressive form of what you already encounter on a daily basis. The biggest draw in Australia is the gigantic Great Barrier Reef, where there are more poisonous and aggressive animals that can kill you. Great White sharks are known to attack surfers off the coast of Sydney, Australia, but more people meet their grisly demise by the tiny little Blue-ringed Octopus in the Reef. For someone who has a death-defying attitude toward life, Australia and New Zealand are the best places to have more than one near death experience to gloat about to your relatives at home. Just remember that if you should find yourself in an undesirable situation in Australia like the situation with the bulls, you are about as likely to die jumping into the water as staying on land.

Armed with new knowledge to easily traverse the plains of the world, try not to rush out all at once to test out my advice, unless you are that aforementioned near-death experience junkie or you just love having the limits of your sanity strained.

P.S. I would also highly recommend attending the Serial Killer Museum in Florence, Italy to test your own faith in humanity.

P.P.S. Don’t be afraid to abandon your well-organized group for sanity preservation. They will completely understand.