Not trying to one up, Jughead, just trying to share
I had a good chuckle out of your shopping cart story.
hmmmm.... so there were events that I was encouraged by my hosts to go to. Now, I was with Rotary International (All Rotary members please stop reading here) and the fundamentals of their exchange program is called the 4-D's, No Drinking, No Driving, No Dating, No Drugs. I don't know a single exchange student who didn't break at least 2 of them.
Everytime we had a Rotary sponsored event, they would remind us of these rules- Then would pour us wine or ask us what kinds of beer we were partial too. Anyway, one weekend near the end of my year there was a large conference and we were invited to stay for food afterwords. After the conference got out everyone poured out to the lobby for an apperatif (before meal drink) which, to exchange students everywhere meant one thing: OPEN BAR!!!
Some of the Rotarians decided that they were going to enforce the rules for once, and asked us to leave if we werent going to be staying for the meal. I had a group of friends who had plans for the rest of the weekend together, so we all stayed, went down to the dining area and had some food and proceeded to get jolly with the more relaxed Rotarians. We had engagements to make it to, so we moved back towards the area where the conference presentations had been and where we had originally been served refreshments and discovered.... an abandoned, previously open, bar.
A group of 6 of us promptly..... liberated.... a case of wine and hit the road. The way travel worked for us is someone would look up the
last bus/train that we needed to take to arrive to our destination at the desired time, and we would loosely schedule backwards from there. From the rotary event, we hit a birthday party, then took a train south to Mons for their annual weekend city party called "Doudou".... Each time we had to wait for another bus or train, we cracked open a new bottle...
While trying to cheat our way out of having to pay train tickets (with the GoPass in Belgium, its complicated) we were opening bottles on the train with...well... whatever we could use to push the cork in. Since the generously donated bottles of wine were worth more than 3 Euros, we were stylin'!
This place where we were ending up was insane. The Belgians really know how to pull out all the stops, between the beer, the history, and the flammand/walloon rivalry? They know how to put on a hell of a festival.
See all those gray hairs? The go at it hard!
That night there were fights (not us, others) and other shenanigans. Eventually we got some of the debatablely second best Frites in Belgium
And after hours when everyone with common sense has gone to bed, we were still cruising around.
Quick nap in the train station come morning
And, I kid you not, everyone was back at it the next morning for the actual "doudou" spectacle (Sir George defeating the dragon, Doudou)
No huge mistakes were made this night (other than me telling two girls I was there to be with them, and my buddy (pictured napping above) attempting to throw down with locals, one of whom one of my lady friends knew....that helped fuel the decision process
) and no sleep was obtained. But it was a hell of a time. :rockin: