Berlin, Indonesia And Egg Salad Sandwiches
🔥 Go to my blog for the latest and greatest articles: https://www.stuartoden.com
I fucking hate New Years. And Halloween.
Those are the two days of the year when it’s painfully obvious that I have no social life.
Everyone is expected to go out and.. I don’t know, celebrate the fact that the year is over? Celebrate the New Year? I don’t get it.
Whatever, the point is that it’s just a slap in the face. The world says, “Hi! Just reminding you that you’re a loser.”
The worst is that EVERYONE feels compelled to talk about it. Even me.
“Doing anything for New Years?”
“Meh, I dunno. I think I’m just going to take it easy and chill.”
Translation: Nobody invited me to any parties.
It wasn’t always this way, though. I mean, it’s been this way for the past few years. But I used to have a social life. I used to have friends.
That’s one of the good things about traveling. Or at the very least it’s what’s good about living in a place that you’re not from.
I feel like when you live in a city that is not your hometown, you’re more driven to make friends. It’s almost like you seek out other people who are also not from there.
Let’s see, what did I do last year? Probably stayed home and played Dota.
This year… I’m staying home and playing Dota.
The year BEFORE that I was in Germany.
Blargh.
Fucking Germany. Living in that shithole was literally one of the worst experiences of my life.
Never move to another country for a love interest. It never works.
Unless you’re a woman. Then you can just have kids and go on welfare.
But alas…
For some strange reason, I decided to move to Berlin and live with my then-girlfriend.
She was a sweet girl. She liked to cook and clean. She had huge tits.
She was also ten years younger than me.
Sadly, that meant that all of the things that she thought were fun and exciting, I thought were stupid and trite.
Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. Especially now, when I spend hours writing these stupid stories that nobody will read about how I wish I had a fucking social life.
I guess the real problem was that I didn’t know how to handle socializing in the presence of my girlfriend. It would piss me off when I’d see that she was attracted to other guys, and I was too whipped to just have a good time anyway.
That was the crux of the problem.
Unfortunately, that little detail would prevent us from making mutual friends. She would occasionally invite me to do something with her friends, and I would always decline.
I remember when we went to Indonesia together. What a fucking disaster.
We had spent the better part of a year living and working in New Zealand. Both of us were looking to extend the magical experience that was our year in Australia, where we met.
Australia, that magical place, had captured both of our hearts and neither of us wanted the party to stop.
We’d spent 4 incredible months together in a hostel and gotten extremely close to one another and the rest of the long-timers who we’d met along the way. Hostel life will do that to you.
Anyway, the point of this backwards ass story is that we’d been through a lot of different shit together.
New Zealand was like an afterparty that you’re really excited to go to, but turns out to be really boring once you get there. And you don’t want to leave right away because it took you an hour and a half to get there.
Neither of us did much more than work while we were there. She had some friends from her restaurant job. I had no friends.
She had some semblance of a social life. I didn’t.
Come to think of it, that New Years was shit too.
Never get a girlfriend.
Anyway, Indonesia was a fucking disaster. I mean sure, if you look at the pictures on Facebook, I suppose it looks like it was fun.
But god damn it, I wanted to break up with her so bad during that trip. It was literally a fucking nightmare.
I guess I’m just a sensitive guy or something, but when I would see her obviously attracted to other guys, it would literally make me want to go berserk.
Not to mention the fact that Indonesia is a fucking shithole, save for a few places. Ubud, for example, which is populated by a bunch of white girls who like to do yoga and eat organic food.
I fucking hated that place from the minute I got there. It’s like a shitty version of Thailand.
Literally, it’s like the people in Indonesia looked at Thailand and were like, “Damn, they’re making a fuckload of money. Let’s copy them!”
Except they just did a terrible fucking job.
On top of that, every leg of the journey was populated with different guys that I felt I had to cockblock lest they fuck my German girlfriend.
28 fucking days of this shit.
I don’t know why I didn’t break up with her.
Actually I do. I remember thinking that if I broke up with her on the trip, we’d have to take the same flight back to New Zealand. It would be awkward as fuck, especially when we had to meet up again so she could get her shit back.
Thinking back, I should have just dumped her then and there. I could have paid the couple hundred bucks or whatever to change my flight and leave her shit somewhere she could find it.
THEN I would have saved the fucking 8 months of my life in the worst city in the world: Berlin.
While I was there, New Years was shit. My gf was (and still is, I assume) studying fashion design and management at some college in Berlin. Her friends were doing something. Having some small party or some shit.
You could tell she REALLY wanted to go. But I had absolutely no interest in going, for fear that she’d flirt with some guy there and I’d feel miserable. Plus I had no desire to hang out with a bunch of dumb fashion-obsessed girls when I couldn’t have sex with any of them.
I told her I didn’t want to go, but that she should go and have a good time.
She refused to go without me.
But before the conversation was over, she wanted to know why I never wanted to hang out with her and other people simultaneously.
I remember thinking to myself, “Fuck, we’re really going to have THIS conversation right now?”
Still, I was honest and told her the truth.
She was confused, hurt, blah blah blah. I remember she even said, “So what, like you’re never going to hang out with me and other people?”
“Nope.”
“You realize it can’t be like that forever, right?”
She was right. I told her so. Then I shrugged.
By that time I was already planning my escape from Berlin. Horrible place.
For one thing, the weather is absolutely terrible.
Not only is it freezing, but there were WEEKS that went by where the sun did not come out. Grey, dark skies for 6 months.
On top of that, the people are horrible. I mean, if they were nice and friendly I guess I could get over the fact that the weather was shit.
But no, people who are FROM Berlin are fucking terrible. I don’t want to be quick to bring up Nazis, but I understand why Hitler was so popular in Germany.
These people fucking HATE foreigners. Even people who are not from Berlin, they fucking hate them too.
Also, the women are ugly.
Sure, I may be biased because I’m from Los Angeles and have seen my fair share of beautiful women.
But before I moved to Berlin, never in my life had I see so many women who I thought at first were men. Only after closer inspection did I realize that this flat-chested beanpole with shorter hair than my cat was actually a female.
I suppose many of them are just so bitter about their shitty weather that they’ve given up on attracting the opposite sex.
Anyway, we decided to “compromise” and just go out to dinner.
We rarely went out to eat. Both of us were pretty frugal (she would stop to pick up pennies on the ground) plus she insisted on cooking dinner almost every night.
So on this special night, we decided to go to some American restaurant and have a steak.
I was still sensitive to the fact that we weren’t going to hang out with her friends. But to her credit, she was trying to have a good time. I felt bad at first.
My feelings of guilt were quickly washed away when I saw her ogling a broad-chested, 6 foot 4 meathead busboy in the restaurant.
Should have dumped her in Indonesia, I thought.
Should have done a lot of things without waiting so fucking long, now that I think about it.
If I ever leave LA, I’ll probably say to myself, “Damn, I should have left LA way sooner than I did!”
Sigh.
I did leave Berlin in March of the following year.
Despite all my misgivings about Hitler’s favorite city, I was not happy to leave.
She was a good girl. Definitely my favorite girlfriend I’ve ever had.
When we were saying goodbye at the airport, the security personnel were staring at us. We were openly sobbing. We hugged, kissed and cried in each others arms because it was questionable whether or not we’d ever see each other again.
But as soon as I got on that fucking plane… oh my god. I felt like a million bucks.
I was so happy to come back to America. Even though I had no prospects and hadn’t made an effort to permanently live in the US in almost ten years, I didn’t give a shit. I was just so happy to get out of Berlin.
Once I got back to America, I obviously had to move back in with my parents.
My good friend Ryan quickly offered me a job as a “partner” expanding his advertising business.
That’s a story for another time though. Let’s stick to this one.
So let’s see… New Years in New Zealand. The gf and I made a gingerbread house, by ourselves in our apartment.
I think she invited me to go hang out with her restaurant friends then also, but I just wasn’t having it.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who gets insanely jealous when I see my significant other’s vagina rapidly moistening in the presence of an attractive male.
I’m careful to observe other couples to see if it’s a thing with them too. A lot of men don’t notice. Some don’t seem to care.
Some, like Maeve’s boyfriend, can definitely tell.
He may try to hide it, but I know that look on his face. It’s the look of recognition that your woman wants to fuck some other guy.
More than that, it’s that your woman is INFATUATED with another man. I recognize that look because I’ve worn it on my own face so many times. It’s not a pleasant feeling.
On the one hand, it’s flattering because Maeve is such a beautiful human being.
Additionally, we don’t have much contact outside of the yoga studio. So while my antennae definitely tingle in recognition of a woman’s attraction towards me, I was not entirely sure because of the limited exposure we have to one another.
The look on her boyfriend’s face confirms it though.
Well, I suppose it doesn’t necessarily confirm it. All it confirms is that’s what HE thinks.
Granted, I’m not a mind reader so I could totally be projecting this entire thing onto them as a result of the combination of my infatuation with Maeve and my baggage from previous relationships.
But let’s try to stay on topic, shall we?
The year before that I actually had an enjoyable New Years.
I had moved to Sydney in August of that year to partner up with the resident Israeli honcho in the mall kiosk (agalot) “industry.”
I use air quotes there because it’s as much of an industry as… I don’t know, collecting plastic bottles.
Anyway, things went well for the first few months. We opened a new location in the hottest mall in Sydney. I could write thousands of words about THAT experience, but suffice to say that it was fun.
I spent the first few months making more money than I’d ever made in my entire life. After all, I was the “owner” of my very own location in the Parramatta shopping center.
I had employees under me and was one of the top salesmen in the company. I felt pretty good about myself.
Unfortunately, these feelings of goodness would come to an end after a particularly trying month.
As inevitably happens in sales jobs, a good month is often followed by a bad one. During this dip in sales, I made the mistake of lowering the minimum price of the products.
The way it works in agalot is that you have a starting price and a minimum price. Your goal is to sell for the highest price, but if a customer needs additional convincing, you have the flexibility to lower the price down to the minimum.
Think of an open-air market in the Middle East or China. You haggle.
After a month of selling our products for 25% less than the allowed minimum, I got an angry call from the honcho berating me for what I had done.
He subtracted the difference from the profits and I was left with nothing for that month. Despite the fact that what he did was legitimate from a business point of view, I was furious.
So angry, in fact, that I soon lost the motivation to manage my workers. I was so depressed that I didn’t even want to go to work.
I took a few weeks off and eventually quit, abandoning the company in the middle of the night after saying goodbye to my friends.
So sad. Boo hoo.
The problem with this was that I left the company in fucking PRIME TIME.
The end of December is the big money time. Hell, all of December is supposed to be good because THAT is the month that you KNOW people are going to be spending money on fucking Christmas presents.
I always had a problem selling in December. I don’t know why. Any other month and I was one of the best. December rolls around and nobody wants to buy from me.
Anyway, I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I had something like 7 months left on my visa in Australia. After so many months trapped in a shopping mall, I wanted to get out there and see what else this amazing country had to offer.
I had a fair amount of money saved up at this point also, something like $10k I think. Not wanting my little nest egg to get too small, I knew I had to find work right away.
Now, in Australia it’s very common for backpackers to work on a farm. Used to be that you could earn an additional year on your visa by completing 3 months of farm work. As far as I know that’s only for British people now.
Anyway, since I had no skills other than selling hair straighteners, I resolved to go find some job on a farm.
I did some googling and found out that there was this little town called Bowen, located just up the East Coast in the state of Queensland. I saw some pictures of a quiet beach town and I decided I wanted to go there.
I took about a week to get up there via various trains and buses, each day staying in a different hostel along the way.
When I made it up there, I realized that I probably should have done a bit more research. Bowen was a town of probably less than 5000 people. There was one main road that went through the town and there were never any cars on it.
Still, I lucked out and found a hostel with some work. That’s how it works up there. The hostels arrange jobs on the farms for the backpackers.
Anyway, I got there on New Years Eve.
I didn’t know anyone, but since the farmers were taking the 1st off, everyone decided to get play drinking games in the common room.
It was just what I needed.
How far we’ve come since then, huh?
This year I’ll be eating egg salad sandwiches, smoking weed and playing Dota.
Speaking of which, I’m hungry.
