The thought of dying flagless must have triggered my survival instinct so I pushed the guy away and we ran down the steep Lisbon streets towards freedom, a truly sobering experience…it was as if someone had nearly stabbed me back into sobriety. So after this setback my buddy and I finally managed to make it back to the party, albeit with quite a story and with a Sahara like thirst for beer and life.

The girls invited us back to their place, Slovakia and I picked up where we left off, and my mate was reenacting the knife incident in the next room, trying to impress the girls. Slovakia and I fooled around for a while before she decided it had been a long day and that “we” should get some sleep.

Fast forward to the last night…my mate and two of the Slovakian ladies came to our hotel for some farewell drinks. I remember that night vividly… we started with Blue Curacao (it was supposed to be a duty free gift) but we decided to drink it anyway since no other shops were open. All four of us sat on the rooftop of the hotel chatting, drinking and smoking Portuguese cigarettes (not smart), as the sun set over Lisbon and the moon rose – I swear it was blue.

Miss Slovakia and I retired to the hotel room where I stayed on 3rd base longer than Mike Schmidt. Normally, when I get that far, there always seems to be a tsunami, or a rise in oil prices, or seismic shift in the tectonic plates that had prevented me from reaching home base. But friends, that night wasn’t the case for it was the day that I got drafted from the bench to the bed…and I’ve been hittin’ homeruns ever since.

The next day, you can imagine the mood of the group when we flew out at 6:30 the next morning. Me: I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop smiling for another appetite was born.

Flags of the World, European flags, Portuguese flag

The first 3 girls I had sex with were from countries other than my own…you could say politically that I was always more interested in foreign policy than domestic. Everyone has a virginity story, most people have a V- Flag story. Mine was a V- V- Flag story…

Flags can come in all shapes and sizes and mostly when you least expect it, that’s what makes them so special…none more so then when that first flag comes along. My first flag came about in a haphazard kind of way on a weeklong school trip to Portugal (I was an Australian exchange student in Denmark)…cue dream sequence…

I remember it as if it was yesterday. You know those rare moments in life when you are consciously living in the here and now; this was one of those times. The weeklong trip started with a bang, tequila shots was the hotel’s way of saying aloha, and it didn’t take long for that translucent liquid to cloud the mind and pave the yellow brick road to possibility. We lived a vampire’s existence for most of the week: awake by day and alive by night, daydreaming our way to reality, seeing some places that I’m sure Vasco De Gama himself never saw…

One of those late night escapades set against the steep backdrop of Lisbon’s Bairro Alto. My Serbian friend and I ventured deep into the city and struck up a conversation of sorts with four smoking hot Slovakian exchange students who started with Portuguese sangria and ended with us agreeing to meet them the next night at the same bar. That we did. They knew of a reggae party a couple suburbs away, so we went with them to check it out—great party, which we never would have known about it if it had not been for our new friends—anyway that night I hooked up with a girl whose Slovakian name was nearly the same as mine, minus a letter (cool but weird), I knew she was older, I didn’t know by how much (24 y/o – I found out later) – and I didn’t take the conversation that way for fear she’d realise I wasn’t even able to vote yet. My friend and I went to the local store to have a feed, but we got lost on the way back to the party. Some guy we met said he knew the way back. Not a good move; little did we know that 10 minutes later he would be pulling a knife on my buddy and I!

To be continued…

Flags of the World, European flags, Portuguese flag