By Jem
When you are in a foreign country, after 25 days of being away from home and having a hard time stomaching the hostel coffee, a quiet “oh shit” from your partner as he roots through his duffle bag that has been in many precarious situations over the past month, causes your brain to jump immediately to the worst case scenario.
We’ve left the passports in the train station in the Middle of Nowhere Germany. Our money pouch full of our final remaining Euros fell down the crack between the seats on the Paris underground. Swiss chocolate melted all over his clothes and now we have to use those remaining Euros to buy him a whole new Portuguese wardrobe, were all thoughts that raced through my head and as I was backing on to the bed, clutching my chest and bracing myself for the oncoming bomb drop that would put a damper on our jaunt across Europe forever, the words “We smuggled magic mushrooms across three borders and onto a French airline” entered my ears and instead of the walls closing in, I burst into laughter.
Before we go on, I must explain how we, two 19-year olds from Canada, acquired the mushrooms in the first place–25 days prior, very jet lagged and quite high from the Amsterdam weed we had just smoked. On the cusp of the Red Light District, next to a store that solely sells novelty rubber duckies, stands one of those stores that sells every drug you can think of. The walls were painted sky blue and were embellished with clouds made out of cotton balls. There was a book of Dutch fairy folklore and a tall, Dutch clerk who was confusing us both sexually.
We decided on mushrooms that would give us a “colourful and laughable trip” and with a quick glance at the clock and the memory that I promised my Oma we would make it to her house (two hours away from Amsterdam) by dinner time, we stashed the mushrooms in an inner pocket of my partners duffle bag and decided to focus on sobering up and not smelling like weed on the train ride, rather than tripping on mushrooms. As you can imagine, when you are visiting your Oma who you only see once a year at best, there is no good time for a mushroom trip. And between trying to understand the broken English from her third husband, and biking through the Dutch countryside, the mushrooms were promptly forgotten.
They then travelled, with us, by train, from Zutphen, the Netherlands, to Frankfurt, Germany, to Basel, Switzerland, where they stayed with us in my partner’s intensely Christian family’s basement, to Paris, France and then by plane to Lisbon, Portugal, where after three days, we were to fly back to Canada.
Now that we are all caught up, this is where you will find us in Lisbon. Sitting across from each other on the bed, at 10 o’clock in the morning, wide eyed and holding dank mushrooms in our sweaty palms. “Each of us have only done mushrooms twice in our entire lives, we are in a forgein city, what’s the worst that can happen,” we ask each other telepathically.
One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go. We shoot the mushrooms to the back of our throats and chew and cough and gag until they are all gone.
With our eyes still watering from the putrid taste and a slight smug grin on our faces, we stumble out of the hostel and descend upon Lisbon. Without thinking they have hit me yet, I hug a cork tree and tell my partner that I would like a smoothie bowl for breakfast.
We find a trendy restaurant with good reviews and without realizing it is a Sunday, we get seated for brunch. The place is completely full, except for two seats at a four person table with two intensely snobby Brits. The waitress asks if we are okay to share a table and lacking time–and retrospect– we accept. That was our first mistake. We were both pretty vegan at the time and watching two Brits scorf down a full meat breakfast as they one up each over all the places they have travelled and messy experiences they have had while doing so, does not pair well with an imposing mushroom trip.
Our second mistake was ordering a full mason jar of the freshly squeezed orange juice. I’m not sure if this is scientifically proven or not, but if you look on any of the forums, they will say that if you want a faster, more intense trip, to drink orange juice or eat some sort of citrus. Forgetting this fact, we both downed the best orange juice we had ever drinken in our lives– on an empty stomach.
I can honestly say that I do not remember the meal except for one vivid moment that I will never forget. After fixating on the British girl peeling the skin off her sausage with a fork and an acrylic nail, my partner grasped my arm. I look up into his eyes and I watch his pupils dilate and his face go pale.
“Jem, we need to get out of here.”
Sensing that I had a closer grip on reality, I took on my responsibility, slowly got up from the table and made my way to the cashier, where I asked to pay. She asks me what table we were sitting at and I point to my partner, where he is sitting with his face in both hands. As I wait for her to queue up the payment terminal, I spot myself in a mirror across the room. I feel as though I have watched my own pupils dilate and as I am confronting my own mortality, the waitress politely clears her throat and I am pulled back to reality once more.
I slowly turn my head back to the cashier, mutter and apology, pay for my food and wave to my partner that we are ready to go
I’m not sure if anyone reading this has been to Lisbon but the tiles the streets are paved with are white, flat, reflective in the sun and uneven – quite the nightmare if your shrooms are hitting and you are trying your best to stumble back to your hoste, whilst trying to maintain composure. It felt like we were trying to walk on fish, or skating for the first time.
Thank God we had a private room in the hostel because I seriously don’t what we would’ve done because we were at the point where it was simply not okay to be in public anymore.
Once we arrived safely in our room, we shut off all the lights, closed the curtains and hid under our blankets while we listened to music and said what colours the songs showed us. Then I got super fixated on what Steve Buscemi was up to because all I could think about was that one scene from Con-Air (Nick Cage movie from the 90’s) where he hands that little girl a doll, tells her to wait there and then never returns and that cat that went viral on the internet a few years ago for looking like him.
Turns out Steve Buscemi isn’t up to much these days, except he is suffering from gum disease, he used to be a firefighter (which was a fact that really stressed me out because my dad also used to be a firefighter and your dad is the last person you want to think of when you are tripping in a forgeign country) and he pronounces his last name “Bu-Semmy” not “Bu-schemmy”. This last one really messed me up and I retreated back under the covers where my partner and I discussed how things aren’t ever truly how they seem, but perhaps that might be for the better.
After some deep breathing, the construction noise outside our window became very loud and we opened the curtains a crack to see what the ruckus was about. It was then we discovered our window did not have a screen on it, so we opened it fully and we shot one of our (only) hair elastics across the street and it landed in the construction site. This prompted a spiral about how we completely changed the course of the hair elastics life and if it had hit one of the construction workers how it might have changed his life too. We talked back and forth for awhile about if we really all are sovereign beings living our lives as the main characters or if some people really are robots.
You know, typical mushroom trip shit.
We descended below the covers once more and reflected on our findings.
After about six hours that felt like one hour and scrutinizing each other’s pupils, we decided we were sober enough to descend upon Lisbon once more and find something else to eat to settle our stomachs
It was here where we discovered the Marquis of Pombal Square (that giant roundabout in the middle of Lisbon) was closed for a street fair. So, like any sensible humans, we rented Lime scooters and shouted and laughed hysterically for I can’t tell you how many rounds around the roundabout, until I almost sprained my ankle because I was so dizzy. I stumbled to a bench and watched my boyfriend go around a little bit longer and decided perhaps I wasn’t as sober as I thought I was.
The night ended anti-climatically, with dinner from grocery store food, sitting in the park, people watching and grabbing gelato.
I wish I had some deep lesson I learned from the mushroom to share with you and that I had found God or something but all that really happened was that we missed a day of the Lisbon sunshine, we realized both our significance and insignificance, and that Steve Buscemi really is a man of mystery.
Written By Jem