Friend Abandoned on Girls’ Trip Abroad, Internet Takes Sides

It seems like a pretty obvious unspoken rule that if you’re on a girls’ trip in a foreign country with your pals, you should expect that you’ll all look after each other in some way. Right?

Again, it might seem obvious — but what if the situation were a little bit more complicated than that?

A woman on the U.K. parenting forum Mumsnet revealed that she was in this situation while on a trip with five friends. She feels that her friends abandoned her — so why are some folks siding with the friends in this scenario? Well, let’s learn the whole story…

In her post on the “Am I Being Unreasonable” (AIBU) forum on Mumsnet, a user who we’ll call Tracy said she’s been distancing herself lately from a group of friends after what happened during their girls’ trip abroad.

For context, Tracy says of the group: “This is a longstanding friendship group but one that doesn’t really see each other that regularly (some individuals see more of each other than others, but as a group it’s more special occasions and occasional weekends away).”

So, here’s how it went down:

During their trip, the ladies decided to check out a local fireworks show, which they’d been told was amazing. Tracy was excited to see it.

At first, two of the ladies in the group decided to bail and go back to the hotel because of the bustling crowds.

No problem, right? So, Tracy and the other three continued on, walking toward an area where they would get a good view of a certain bridge and see the fireworks.

But after a while, Tracy’s three remaining pals weren’t feeling it anymore and decided they didn’t want to continue on.

“I personally really wanted to see the display,” Tracy explains, “as [I] had heard it was meant to be amazing, and the spot we had stopped at wasn’t far away from where we needed to be.”

Tracy claims that all they had to do was keep walking toward the end of the street in order to see the show, because they couldn’t see it from where they were in that moment.

Here’s where things started to heading south.

“No one else wanted to come with me, so [we] agreed I would go and they would stay where they were. But then at some point whilst waiting for the fireworks to start, I got a message to say it had started to get too busy where they were so they had also headed back to hotel,” she writes.

“So basically I was left out alone in a foreign country, about half an hour’s walk from our hotel (probably almost 1 a.m. by time I got back),” she says.

Tracy was pretty unhappy about the situation, but didn’t want to let on how she felt and potentially ruin the trip. But after they all got back home, she found herself distancing herself from this group of friends.

“AIBU to think you don’t leave one friend out on their own in a foreign country and maybe at least one person could have stayed to make sure I got home OK?” Tracy writes. “Or was I being difficult wanting to stay out when clearly no one else did and I should have just left when they did regardless if I wanted to see the fireworks?”

“In my opinion, though, it would have been such a shame to miss them (and they were amazing),” she adds. “But now I’m left feeling like these aren’t real friends and I’ve started finding excuses to bail out of some of the get-togethers.”

“There’s no way I’d leave a true friend in that scenario,” one person commented under Tracy’s post.

On the flip side, someone else wrote: “You made the decision to go alone. I don’t see much difference to them waiting for you in the street or waiting at the hotel, you’re still out on your own. If you didn’t want to be out alone you should have stayed with them. It was a shame no one else wanted to stay out with you but that’s their choice too.”