This one didn't actually happen to me, but it's in line with Papaver's story & her being belgian. When I first started dating a belgian guy, he hadn't told his parents/family in Belgium that he had a girlfriend... A while later, he gets a call and his family knows that he has a girlfriend.... Because... one of his colleagues at work in Washington, DC had gone on vacation and climbed up Mount Kilimanjaro... and while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro meets a belgian guy and mentions, oh I work with a guy from Belgium! Turns out it was a childhood friend of the belgian bf's.... and they got to talking about his new gf... So the friend goes back to Belgium to report to the family that there apparently was a gf that noone had heard about.


Odd thing that happened to me - I was doing the Inca trail to Machu Picchu when Fujimori resigned as president of Peru... It's a 3 day walk, 4th day at Machu Picchu... And we arrive and learn that Fujimori has resigned. We just sight see, take pictures, and when we're done exploring walk down to the town to take the train out. We buy our train tickets, but gradually the train station is getting fuller and fuller of people coming down from Machu Picchu and apparently... there is a train strike. So the train is basically going to be standing room only when it comes and only so many people are going to fit to leave... Everyone's getting a bit agitated, because what are we all going to do at Ages Calientes?

But eventually, hours later, the train finally arrives and they've managed to add a couple box cars to it - so everyone fits, it's still just standing room only.

Then I think we flew from Cusco to Puno/Lake Titicaca and there was a layover in Arequippa ... And at this point, there is a truck strike and whoever knows what other strike. So when we get to our lay over, there's no airplane fuel at the airport... our plane can't actually take off again.

So after a while, they deplane us.... And after another while, another airplane comes a long, parks near our airplane.... And they stick a big hose from the new airplane into our airplane and start siphoning fuel from the one to fill the other.

We wake up in Puno the next day, and there's soldiers marching the streets... and we're going... Oh no! Was there a coup??? Turns out it was some march for a festival of some sort.

Much later on, we got back to Lima - the brother of a Peruvian that we were visiting there was a congress person who was in line to possibly take Fujimori's place, so he got us a tour of the capital building... which was surrounded with protesters and riot police.

It sort of struck me - that for a democracy and the rest of that, the US doesn't really have that much in the way of protests or civil action most of the time.