Forced to dance & Co.: Our best travel stories

Forced to dance & Co.
We reveal the editors’ best travel stories

In other countries, a lot of things are exciting and new. The culture, the people, the architecture, the food – just to name a few. And it is not uncommon for unusual encounters or experiences to occur that we still like to talk about years later. We have summarized the most bizarre and special travel experiences from our editorial team for you.

Our best travel stories

The longest dance of my life

My first trip to Greece took me to a very small mountain village in the 80s. It was autumn and the time of village festivals. People sat together in the village square, ate and drank, and later on there was dancing. In preparation for the trip, I took a basic Greek course and an accompanying dance course – perfect! When a song that I knew was played (and one or two glasses of retsina had been emptied), I joined the dancers.

What I didn’t know: The music is ordered and paid for by a family. And then she dances. No one else. Except for me. They probably found the strange dancer very strange, but nice, and some family then ordered the next dance for me. I didn’t know it, but it didn’t help. The scarf was handed to me and I led an XXL dance line in the middle of the village square for the longest minutes of my life. The village youth had a lot of fun and I became a lot more careful afterwards.
– Anke

A mountainous temple in Busan

While on vacation in Korea, I convinced the friend I was traveling with to go to a faraway temple. But I didn’t know that the path from the bus stop would take us endlessly up a mountain. According to Google Maps it was only supposed to be 13 minutes…but it would have been more like 45. And it was 30 degrees.

Stubborn and optimistic as I sometimes am, I saw no problem when I looked up the mountain and vastly underestimated the distance. The people who watched us as we climbed through the village watched us laughing – my traveling companion was getting worse and worse. But then a taxi driver stopped and called us over. We were so exhausted from the first part of the hike that we got started straight away. He asked us if we wanted to go to the temple, we said yes. He drove us up the steep mountain for five to ten minutes, but when we tried to pay for it he just laughed and waved us off. We were incredibly grateful. On the way back we found an unmarked shortcut… which took us back down to the bus stop in about 20 minutes.
– Lena

A special encounter

After graduating from high school, I went on vacation to Mallorca with my best friend, that was in 2005. On the return flight we had to wait at the airport. Then I started talking to an older, very nice gentleman. It turned out that he was an Auschwitz survivor and gives lectures at schools. Like me, he was from Potsdam and his name was Willi Frohwein. He has since died. As a young woman, just meeting a survivor filled me with awe, as I was dealing with it a lot at the time. I was deeply impressed. And then he showed me the tattoo of his prisoner number: 122785. My birthday is July 22, 1985.
– Julia

Just quickly to the beach

On a beach vacation with my mother, she waited for me in front of our accommodation in a red VW Golf. I just wanted to quickly grab my surfboard and wetsuit and jump back in the car.

Back down in front of the hotel, I rushed to the car, frantically opened the trunk, pushed my board into the car, threw my wetsuit on the back seat, ran to the front and sat down in the passenger seat with aplomb. A little out of breath, I looked “Okay, let’s go!” and looked to the left.

I will never forget the strange man’s frightened look. He looked at me completely perplexed and amazed. I laughed out loud and apologized. My mother was sitting just a few meters ahead in what looked like the same car and was watching the situation in the rearview mirror. We both had tears in our eyes as I got into the “real” car with her.
– Laura

Inconspicuously is different

My first visit to my former boyfriend’s family in a Greek mountain village was not entirely without conflict. After a major argument I decided to leave. Unannounced and youthfully dramatic. The plan was: hitchhike to the next village and from there take the bus and train to Germany. The XXL village lunch break seemed to me to be the ideal time. What I hadn’t considered was that there aren’t any cars driving there – except for the garbage truck.

The garbage people took me, a lonely wanderer, with them – hurrah! – and after a few kilometers we turned into the forest – yikes! I made a big fuss out of fear and hurled all the Greek swear words I knew at the men. Until we got to the dump. Just a garbage dump in the forest… The rest of the drive to the next village was quiet. The story of the hysterical German arrived in the village with me, and before the bus arrived the family had picked me up again.
– Anke

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Bridget