I just finished a ten day trip through seven European countries—quite a feat if you ask me. It wasn’t just any trip; I was the only male traveler and was surrounded by four girls. Each one of these girls somehow proves to be more female than the rest, too, so imagine my predicament.

I’m quite confident in my masculinity, I promise. I can’t shop without a solid idea of what I’m looking for, I can’t reason spending 100 Euros on a pair of ugly boots, and I don’t like taking an hour to get ready in the morning when the only plans for the day are a ten-hour train ride. Obvious disagreements ensued over the course of the week-and-a-half. I rarely if ever got my way or did something that I wanted to do. I sat outside shops in Vienna and along the Champs-Elysées and was bitter.

Then I received invaluable insight into the female condition: the period. The duration of the trip blessed all four young women (I think!) with an excuse to be uncontrollably moody and often aggressive in getting their ways. I had no where to turn, no male sympathy to find, for every direction led to one of the four, and no matter what, I knew I had to catch the next train with them. I felt partially trapped into this life of disorder and irritability. Their state caused them to take numbers of ridiculous action that affected the plans of the trip, like loose a train ticket, fight in the middle of the streets of Paris, eat pounds of chocolate and complain about their digestive systems, and buy large amounts of clothing and accessories.

From bird’s-eye view, that was my “Ten Day”. I soon found myself having the male equivalent of the monthly female cycle—the girls were “pulling” me (a difficult concept to grasp). I found my own moodiness, my own difficulty with the world and especially those surrounding me, and the only way to sum this up was that they had somehow worked strange female voodoo and caused me to find my own…period! What had I done? What agony did I dive into by agreeing to accompany these females around Europe? Perhaps it took this abnormal psychological event to make me realize the fortune of my own condition. I was surrounded by these beautiful girls who love life the best way they know fit. They dealt with my refusal to ask direction, I dealt with their inability to reason. And in this sense, in ten long days of dealing with each other and learning their faults and how to deal with them, we could function as a more unified five.

By the sixth day, what should have been the low of the trip turned out to be, to us, exactly what we could have asked for. The plan: train to Belgium, an afternoon in Brussels, and head toward Amsterdam for dinner. The reality: Luxeumbourg, the only ticket we could get out of Paris that afternoon. Until that time, any deviation from the plan had left us in an extremely low and sour state. This was a major departure, but we all took it in stride. In retrospect, it almost seems like a miracle; but in analysis of the patterns of our group dynamics, we had just learned how to deal with each other as the dysfunctional family that we were. It gave us time to not care about the plan, to walk around and sing songs, and to eat Tex-Mex on the edge of a fortress—all the random kinds of things that a silly family would do. It’s weird, we’re weird, but it was perfect.

For some reason, the plan recommenced the following day like clockwork, and we finished the ten days strong as a united family. These four young women went from friends from school to sisters. I know them so very well, from their tiniest fault to their guilty pleasures to what days I need to steer clear of them. I had wanted to discover Europe, but I think the more important treasure I discovered was the bond of “Team: Let’s Go!”, the name we designated to our group of five. It sums up how we were: perhaps we were having a bad day, perhaps we were grumpy, but we realized that we had to travel, we had to venture around cities and between cities, and, especially, we had to get up out of our own condition and find the happiness in what we were doing for the sake of our period-befallen selves and for the group. Exclamation point! Thus, let’s go! I am forever thankful to these girls for their constant reminding of what being female is like, allowing me to experiencing it, and for their contribution of grief and love in our ten-day family that made the trip enjoyable. I will remember it forever.