I Wish I Knew Liam Neeson

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Have you ever seen the movie “Taken,” starring Liam Neeson? If you haven’t, I really recommend it. However, I recommend you don’t watch it right before your first trip to Europe. Basically, the movie is about a girl who travels abroad with a friend, gets kidnapped, and sold into prostitution through a disturbing human auction. Luckily her dad (played by Neeson) is a complete badass retired CIA agent, and is able to help rescue her and get revenge on her capturers. I can admit it was a little on the farfetched side, but these situations such as young girls being forced into sex slavery unfortunately aren’t unheard of. Anyway, my best friend and I decided to watch this movie right before we left for Germany. Literally two weeks before. I don’t honestly know what we were thinking, but we did it anyway. It scared us, but we knew we would be safe and with responsible adults.

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We all but forgot about the movie until one night. Our school group was staying in a hotel, and we were divided up into pairs of two to share rooms. It was late at night, or rather very early in the morning, when the friend I was rooming with and I headed back to our room from our friends’ down the hall. We were just about to collapse from exhaustion when we heard a knock on the window. My friend was more collected than I was – she hadn’t seen the movie and is admittedly more collected than I in stressful situations. She brushed it off as a tree branch or the wind, and we continued washing up. Then we heard it again. It was definitely a knock. And voices, clearly calling to be let in. I had thoughts of predators searching for young girls in my head; my friend, always recklessly brave, wasn’t so much worried as curious. She pushed aside the curtain and peered outside.

Not my friends; random guys from the Internet

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“There are people out there!” I remember her whispering, now a little fear in her voice. I went to take a look now – it was true. There were definitely figures outside, male figures. We looked at each other, truly freaking out now. Just as we were considering getting a chaperone, a face pressed against the glass. A familiar face, though flushed with intoxication. There were at least six boys from our group outside, all completely wasted (we were legal drinking age there). My friends and I still joke about the time we had six boys crawl into our hotel room at 3 AM. We helped them in, got them into bed, and made them thank us ten thousand times the next morning – the front door to the bed and breakfast was locked, and they would have been left outside till morning. I was relieved. Even though drunken high school boys are certainly not fun to take care of, I would take that any day over being in serious danger. So, since we all don’t have Liam Neeson in our family trees, we have to watch out for ourselves. From this experience I learned that it’s certainly important to have fun, but it’s even more imperative to be safe, as you never know what might happen, especially in a place where you are far from home and don’t know anyone.