Train Life
/We survived Prague! After spending our last day carefully packing our things and booking tickets for an early morning train, promising ourselves we’d be good and go to bed early … we promptly went and got drunk at an underground Irish Pub where we stopped when we first arrived.
That was where we got to witness a bar chock-full of mostly Brits singing along heartily to “Country Roads”. We exchanged awkward laughs with a dude from Chicago over the fact that we were in an Irish bar in Prague listening to non-Americans singing along passionately to a song about West Virginia. This is why I love traveling. All about the mish-mash, baby.
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Grumpy as fuck, we still managed to get up and make our train with plenty of time to spare. On our first leg, from Prague > Berlin Spandeau station, we got one of those tiny four seater apartments on the train, which is always fun. Or, it was until a dude wedged his rolly suitcase into our car and locked us into squished positions for the remainder of the ride.
Upon arriving at Spandeau Station, we discovered we had about 30 minutes to get food and get on the next train to Cologne. We split up to get food with hilariously slow results. I chose impractical ingredients for a French picnic - a FULL sized baguette, cheese slices, and fruit snacks from a tiny grocery store. James, for his part, picked the more reasonable to-go hot sandwiches but got stuck with the one worker who didn’t speak a word of English. I got stuck behind an elderly lady checking out who had a lot of questions. But at least she said “Entschuldigung” to me, which is one of the few German words I now recognize. Mental note to make a master list of how to say these phrases in different languages: Hello, Thank you, Please, Sorry.
That’ll get me far, right? I always attempt to speak the language where I am and either they respond to me in English because they’ve seen through my ruse, or worse - they respond to me in that language and then I have to admit I’m an asshat and don’t actually know anything beyond what I said.
Flustered and scrambling to make our train clutching our food, we ended up on the escalator behind an elderly woman moving comically slow. It reminded me of the series of events that immediately followed me renting my first U-Haul van on an icy day in Baltimore, when both an elderly man with a cane AND a woman with a stroller jumped out in front of me on the road. Have you ever been in such a rush that the universe collaborates to throw the slowest pokes in your route? Magical. (Oh — and no one died that moving day. I swear.)
We made the train, and James managed to eat his sandwiches on the platform before it showed up, all throwing his trash away and brushing away crumbs, all spic and span. My dumbass was still holding a full size baguette while winding my way through a hot, overcrowded train. But I was committed now — this was my choice and I was going to follow through with it, g’dammit! This bread is mine!! It’s too late to go back! I ended up squeezing myself in the seat next to an extremely neat, prim German woman. She was nibbling out of a tiny tupperware of carrots brought from home - I, on the other hand, was the monster ripping off pieces of crumbly baguette and horking down cheese before it melted. This monster - this is what I’ve become.
Finally after 8 1/2 hours of train travel, we made it to Cologne!
