Vatican City is the smallest country in the world, and Ryan Trahan was standing in it with a seven-day countdown already running. The plan was deceptively simple: visit as many of the world’s 195 countries as possible, but with one binding rule that made it genuinely hard. In every country, a stranger had to choose where he went next. He had exactly one veto to burn across the entire week, and the trip had a rival: a man named Maurice, who holds a world record by biking to 18 countries in seven days.
Strangers steering a stranger through Europe
The first handoff happened at the Colosseum in Rome, where Amelia and Ollie from Leicester sent him to England. They also gave him his first cultural mission: find a jacket potato, the British staple of a baked potato loaded with cheese, beans, and coleslaw. A late-night search through London turned up no jacket potato, but a family named Feda, Lea, and Linda did send him to the Netherlands, with instructions to eat bitter balls, the Dutch deep-fried snack he eventually tracked down at a spot in Amsterdam whose staff confirmed he had, indeed, ‘been told right.’
From Amsterdam, a traveler named Liam sent him toward Austria with a quietly strategic reason: Austria sits at the edge of what Trahan started calling the Quad, four countries converging in a tight geographic cluster. Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the fourth-smallest country in the world, Liechtenstein, were all within driving range of each other. An overnight train was supposed to unlock the whole sequence, but a cancellation stranded him in Dusseldorf, standing in Germany at midnight, a country he could not count because no stranger had sent him there. The delay cost him six to seven hours.
The Quad, a wiener schnitzel, and a chocolate shop in Zurich
He rented a car in Austria and started eating his way through the plan. A sign advertising schnitzel pulled him into a town square where musicians were playing trumpets unironically in the middle of the afternoon. ‘I have stumbled into paradise,’ he said, and meant it. A stranger named Stefan, met in the lakeside German town of Lindau that evening, chose Liechtenstein. The drive took 47 minutes. He called Stefan a buzzer-beater.
Switzerland followed within five minutes of crossing the Liechtenstein border by car. In Zurich, a chocolate shop owner named Francie, who started making chocolate in her own kitchen with only cocoa beans and sugar and was celebrating her tenth anniversary in business, sent him to Norway. ‘To start a business you need to be quite crazy,’ she said, ‘and just don’t think too much.’
Oslo was country nine. Denmark was ten, reached by train through an underwater rail tunnel connecting Copenhagen to Malmo. In Copenhagen’s Tivoli amusement park, three strangers named Johannes, Philippa, and Matilda huddled, strategized, and on the count of three announced Sweden. All three of them were Swedish. Country eleven, Malmo, came with a park of ancient trees planted in a mathematically perfect circle that Trahan described as looking AI-generated.
Portugal arrived via a stranger at Malmo’s train station who said ‘Porto,’ and rather than veto it, Trahan flew to Lisbon. He picked up one Portuguese word: ‘bipoka,’ which means popcorn. On the final morning, day seven, he tried and failed to find a vendor selling a Belgium jersey, which was his scheme for nudging a stranger toward Belgium without technically breaking the rules. The jersey plan collapsed. Two strangers named Abin and Noval, whose answer he bleeped for dramatic effect, sent him somewhere that had been referenced since the very first minute of the trip.
An unused veto button in Rio
The final flight landed in Brazil.
Thirteen countries in seven days. Maurice’s record of 18 remained intact.
Somewhere in the Zurich airport on day four, a Norwegian man Trahan had just met suggested that the single essential Oslo experience was eating at an all-you-can-eat Brazilian restaurant. The restaurant was closed when he arrived. The veto button, carried through train cancellations and a midnight in Dusseldorf and a fruitless jersey search in Lisbon, came home to Rio de Janeiro unused.
