The World’s Worst Traveler And Her Business Success

More or less on a whim, she had decided to pack her bags and take off to the first European city that she could think of. After all, it was summer and she felt the urge to get away. As it turned out, though, there was a major flaw in her plan, which happened to be the not so small matter of getting a seat on one of the flights heading to that city. Every travel agent in town told her that everything was sold out, and that she should have booked months ago.

She was left with no choice but to change her travel plans in the end. Instead of going to the destination of her choice, she ended up heading to the only one with seats that were available. Being the plucky individual that she was, it did not deter her in the slightest that it happened to be the capital city of a minuscule country that neither she, nor her travel agent, had ever head of before. She threw a pile of girls shirts and skirts, plus a few unmentionables, into her suitcase and headed off into the wild blue yonder.

Put in a nutshell, that is how she wound up in the middle of a country where nobody, not one soul, could speak her language. This resulted in something of a heart-stopping moment when the customs agent examining her bags suddenly gave her the strangest of looks. He gestured towards her Swarovski earrings and began jabbering excitedly in his own language. At first she thought that she must have violated a local regulation by wearing them, but through some rudimentary sign language and crudely drawn pictures depicting stick-figures carrying guns being chased by other stick figures in police uniforms, the agent was able to communicate that he was only warning her about local thieves.

As she exited the airport, she realized that she had made a terrible mistake. The climate was not warm and cheerful at all. A blast of wind that felt like it had come directly off the polar ice cap blew up her skirts and sent them flying. Not only was the wind cold, it was rude! Firmly gathering her skirts around her, she flagged what she hoped was a taxi.

Her luck appeared to be changing at last. Her driver not only appeared to have been looking elsewhere when the wind behaved so rudely, he also recognized the name of her hotel from the printed out confirmation that she waved under his nose. After twenty heart-stopping minutes spent racing along a highway on which every driver seemed to be testing their Formula One racing skills, she arrived at her hotel a bit shaken-up, but none the worse for wear.

Bright and early the next morning, she arose and set straight out for the city’s center, despite her experiences of the previous day. It turned out to be one of those life-changing decisions that happen so very rarely. For, wherever she turned, she was shop windows filled with row upon row of exquisitely and ornately designed men wedding bands. In a flash, she had her calculator out and, after doing all the math, concluded that she could easily make more than five hundred percent profit if she resold them back home.

That day, on a street out in the middle of nowhere, a new business came into the world. There still is not a single citizen of that strange little country who is capable of speaking a language other than the one that they were born to. But that does not bother our heroine. She prefers it that way, since it helps to keep where she gets her rings from a closely guarded secret. She has, after all, learned their language.