I learned a lesson one Thanksgiving, but I'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly what it was. You're probably thinking "So what?", but learning lessons is a big deal for me because I think I know everything already.
I'll start with some background information. Ming and I lived abroad the entire 2004-2005 school year. I don't remember why (the most likely explanantion is that we were drinking or on drugs) but she and I agreed to spend Thanksgiving in Romania with our pal May and a couple of girls who looked like cartoon pigs, you know, the kind that wear clothes.
I don't know if we were jinxed because we never bought tube socks from the Gypsies outside our university, but everything about that long weekend was hellish. Highlights include: me fighting a Gypsy with bent skis for legs because he wouldn't leave our train compartment, our host Eugene (what the hell kind of name is that for a Romanian? His business would double if he told people his name was Vlad. Idiot.) who used his role as "hotel" owner to try and find a woman who would marry him and give him citizenship anywhere else on earth, the teacup pigs insistence that we be in bed by 7 every night so we could climb up mountains in the morning, me sliding down the 457 steps of
Vlad the Impaler's castle on my ass only to be groped by AMERICANS at the bottom, and our host's mother who snuck around at 5 in the morning hoping to catch us using the bathroom. As strange as all this may seem, one man singlehandedly takes the cake for most memorable experience of that entire nightmare.
This man was the best friend of our host Eugene. Obviously he had a first and last name, but we will never know what it is because he roundly insisted in his cartoon-baby-bird voice that we call him "The Bearman". I am not the kind of person who would ever go looking for a giant bear. They are scary because they could kill me. The Bearman, however, finds giant bears to be the greatest source of entertainment on earth. Merely observing them is not satisfying enough for this man. As he explains in his teeny-tiny voice, "I was on Animal Planet. The bear ate a wafer out of my mouth". That's right, homeboy lets bears eat cookies out of his mouth while people record it, and I have the picture to prove it.
That still stands as my most memorable Thanksgiving, probably because I've spent my other adult Thanksgivings getting drunk while watching
Rudy, passing out, eating dinner, and getting drunk again.
Anyways, back to the lesson learned. I want to say something akin to "Different strokes for different folks", but after rereading this post, the lesson I want to share with you is "Don't fucking go to Romania".
