Eurotrip 2022 Chronicles: The Heroes
Context: every so often, Exodus employees meet up IRL to vacation and co-work together. Wonderful and memorable things happen. Unfortunately, half of those memories drown at the bottom of a glass. The other 49% disappear into the ether, casualties of bugs in short-term to long-term memory consolidation, exacerbated by certain individuals snoring themselves and everyone around them into an early grave. Sleep apnea is not a joke (yet).
Enough FUD. 1% is plenty. I’ve filled the gaps with poetic license, smoothed over inconsistencies with ambiguity and diluted the result with lies that I’ve since convinced myself are true, using the great science of homeopathy. The Truth is dead, long live The Truth!
We’re in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. At night we usually go out for dinner together and then we get some drinks at a bar or a club. But this one night Andrej promises to take us to a special place, an outdoor hangout where all the cool Slovenian kids go to drink responsibly after graduating from elementary school.
Diego and I are charged with procuring the alcohol, mixers and plastic cups. It’s getting late and all the stores in Ljubljana close early. 8:59pm is rush hour for buying alcohol. We recruit The Toastmaster and Muscles in case we need a diversion, and beat traffic by seconds. The clerk looks impressed with how much the mere four of us plan to consume. and we‘re so proud to measure up that we don’t tell him there’ll be twelve of us. Unfortunately, we also manage to put our four heads together and forget the plastic cups. That’s fucking teamwork! We’re going to have to drink from the bottles. We’re going to have terrible hangovers. We’re all going to get covid. Can good coding practices be transmitted through saliva? We don’t know. Neither do scientists, to this day.
Then I have a brilliant idea. We’ll buy a case of bottled water, pour it out and use the bottles as cups. It’ll make for some awkward pouring but it’ll do. The bigger problem is that as I’ve already mentioned, the stores are all closed. The idea makes no sense. And I can’t even blame it on teamwork this time.
We decide to go to McDonald’s and ask them for some cups. Fede and I volunteer for the mission. Sorry, Don Federico Manuel Ponce de Leon Gabriel the 1st and I volunteer. The girl at the register eyes us suspiciously and asks how many cups we need. I bravely say “twenty” as an opening bid, thinking we can negotiate her down to ten. She frowns and says she has to talk to the manager. We wait patiently. It goes all the way up the ladder to the CEO, who’s busy trying to navigate McDonald’s through a tough market. She comes back with a hard no. Don Fede starts crying. Not really, but that’s how I choose to remember it. We beg her for just 2–3 cups but she doesn’t budge an inch. For a second we almost doubt our charm and good looks. Well, I do. Don Fede looks pretty confident. With a name that starts with Don, who can blame him?
By this time everyone else had headed to the hangout and Don Manuel and I are alone and feeling the pressure. No one keeps an Exodian sober against his will without serious consequences. And my sister’s going to be there. If I fail to deliver the goods, I’ll be hearing about it every New Year’s for the rest of my life, like that time I tutored her in math and drove her into the arms of the humanities. We walk towards the hangout, our heads spinning desperately, looking for opportunities but feeling more creative than practical. Can we find ten homeless people in time and how much would they charge for their cups? Never mind, this country is a freaking paradise, we’d be lucky to find one homeless person.
As we walk past some bar, we figure maybe they’ll take pity on us. We go in and shyly ask the bartender for some plastic cups. How many do you need? he asks. Don Ponce de Leon and I look at each other, having already lost this game once, and use secret ancient hand gestures to agree on five. “Five,” Fede says. The bartender hesitates for a moment, but then says he’ll give us the cups if we buy a beer. We say that sounds great but that we’ll need ten. He laughs and agrees. After we pay and get the cups, we shamelessly ask if he can throw in two more. He looks at us, sees how tragically sober we are, and finds two cups worth of empathy.
This is such a small thing but I swear, Fede and I feel like heroes. Like we just took down the evil empire. Like we figured out cold fusion.
At around 11 we get to the outdoor hangout. It’s a very colorful place. There’s provocative graffiti on the building walls, garbage dumpsters and bathroom doors, and there’s a hundred or two people of all ages milling about in small groups. Every group has its own supplies: alcohol, mixers, glue, whatever else kids do these days, and is doing its own thing. In some other big city I’d be nervous and a little creeped out, but it feels very safe. I don’t see anything more dangerous than public urination. And I don’t see that either.
I don’t know if you’ve ever sold cigarettes or drugs or alcohol to a minor. I certainly haven’t. About an hour or so in, a kid comes up to our group looking to trade. He looks 12 years old. He says that he and his friends have run out of mixers. Are we willing to trade him some orange juice for some vodka?
Fede’s and my eyes meet in the dark. We feel a strong sense of kinship towards this brave youngster, who like us, procured the alcohol, but forgot a little detail like cups or juice. What kind of vodka? we ask. Oh, the worst cheapest vodka there is, he says proudly, like he invented it. We say we’ll give him some juice but on one condition: he keeps his vodka to himself. It’s a deal. It’s also a weird moment of cognitive dissonance. I feel like a criminal handing him that orange juice.
Miraculously, the kid doesn’t turn out to be a plainclothes cop and I don’t feel the cold slap of handcuffs on my wrist. No one reads me my rights. I guess I’ll have to take that tour of a Slovenian prison the old fashioned way, on TikTok.
The story ends there, but the night goes on. Things happen. We measure the toxicity of an infamous Israeli liquor with the only instruments we have, our bodies. I get a mountain of dirt on Andrej from his girlfriend. Diego has the best meal of his life. Faris’s name is mentioned and hundreds of Slovenian ears tune in reverently…
