the train ride

for the sake of time i will stray from my normal style; i will still right one long run on sentence, but with more words and less spaces... i will preface this with a few observations cait and i have noticed about the train system in europe; there is no security when boarding a train, none. there are no rules of the road or guides to help you navigate through all the unspoken rules; but they are effcient and relatively inexpensive. some other items i should note; for those who have never been on an overnight train, picture a small cabin with three seats on each side that all fold down to make three beds on each side; three deck bunk bed on each side if you are looking at it; when we boarded we had no idea how this worked, when the beds should be flipped and who should be doing it.

and now the story...

cait and i board twenty minutes early, a young man sits next to cait and i with no luggage for a 14 or something hour train ride... odd; we say hello and he returns our pleasntries; train leaves twenty minutes late, no big deal. since cait and i know nothing about this type of train, we ask him if he knows, he responds with i have ticket. ok so he does not know english as much as we thought. a bit later cait asks where he is from, he ignores her a few times. he then proceeds to read the same page of the koran over and over again, starting singing something in arabic within in like a one foot radius of cait and i; now we have never seen anything like this before so it may be normal so be it, but it kind of freaked us out...

later an older gentleman joins us; welcomes himself to our cabin by yelling at us in italian about how we can help him place his suitcase in the right spot; after five minutes, he does it himself and is frustrated with us and lets us know it, in italian of course; we shake our heads; now this guy has been smoking two packs a day since he was 12, so he looks and smells like it, not pleasant to say the least...

by now its 930 and both guys are dozing off, so they old guys starts to gesture at us to put the beds down so he and the other guy can sleep; we oblige and the two guys take off to somewhere; the young guy comes back an hour later and goes to sleep, the other guys paces outside our cabin for a good two hours until almost 1145 then finally comes in and lays down; so very confusing...

we are all trying to fall asleep to the sweet smell of ashtray and we make it to our first stop, (side note: we gave our passports and tickets to the conductor when we boarded so he would not wake us in the middle of the night, totally normal, but the young guys passport is pink, again strange) at about midnight we hear pounding on the door next to us and someone yell police; the young guy bolts out of our room, next time we see him he's in police custody getting his things and being escorted off the train with three others from our car...

during the series of next six stops police at each station boarded our train, knocked on our door and asked where that dude was...

now again this may be normal, but for a first timer here it was quite intense at momments...

cait and i got very little sleep while worrying about who was in our cabin, waking every few hours to the police and breathing ashtray through a blanket or pillow...

needless to say likely our last overnight train

but we have arrived safely in amsterdam

it is rainy