Amsterdam-Berlin
In retrospect, I'm very glad I woke up when I did on Sunday morning. At the time, however, my headache was pounding out any thoughts of gratitude I might have had. I looked at my watch. 8:35. The train left at 9:30.
"Fuck," I said, and l leapt out of bed.
The guy in the bed next to mine had just gotten up and looked as disoriented as I must have. "You have a long night too?" I asked.
"Dude," he said, "we smoked, like, nine joints. I'm still fuckin' high."
I brushed my teeth, then rinsed off as well as I could in 30 seconds. God, I reeked--smoke in my hair and beer oozing out of my pores. No time for a shower; I had to run.
I stuffed my things into my backpack, hurried down the stairs, dropped off my key at the desk and started walking to the train station as fast as I could. If I had learned one thing in Amsterdam, it's the fairly obvious lesson that if you follow the streetcar tracks toward the city center, you'll end up at the train station.
Early on a Sunday morning, Amsterdam was very quiet. I saw only a few people on my walk; a nearly empty streetcar passed me once.
I arrived at the train station with about ten minutes to spare. A kiosk was open in the main hall. I bought a Coke and headed for my platform. The platform, to my dismay, was quite crowded, and even more dismaying was that when the train arrived and I boarded, I found that having no reservations, I wasn't getting a seat at all.
I ended up in a long line of people moving through car after car, seeking a place to sit. In one car, a woman found her reserved seat, sat down, placed her suitcase perpendicularly across the aisle, and proceeded to get comfortable. The young woman directly in front of me stared her down. The seated woman looked up blankly. Irritated, the young woman picked up the suitcase, shoved it in front of the seated woman's feet, and continued down the aisle.
Enraged, the woman stood up and yelled to her offender, "Say, 'Excuse me!'" She was English. "You could at least be polite!"
Everyone ignored her. The young woman's behavior might have been rude, but she wasn't the one who thought it was acceptable to block the entire aisle.
At last I found a spot where I could stand in relative peace, near the bathroom in a car with individual cabins. I stowed my backpack on a shelf, and stood, looking out the window. At each stop, more people boarded and I got jostled around a bit as they walked by to find their seats, but for the most part I was alone with my hangover.
That is, until we came to our first stop in Germany. A man boarded
the train carrying what was and remains to this day the single largest
piece of luggage I have seen in my life. It was a wheeled blue and
red duffle bag, densely packed. It was big enough that if he curled
up in the fetal position, it could easily have held its rather large owner,
or the two dead bodies I speculated he was carrying. He tried to
take the bag down the aisle, but before he even got to the door of the
first cabin, it got stuck. People were backed up behind him and the bag.
A petite woman, unfazed, just stepped on it and continued on her way to
her seat. A conductor came and started speaking sternly to the man
in German, then switched to English when
the man looked back uncomprehendingly.
"You cannot leave the bag there. It is illegal to block the aisle."
The man acquiesced without responding, and moved the bag to none other than the corner I was inhabiting. There was just enough room to place it by the wall next to the bathroom door. To get to the bathroom, you had to navigatethe six inches of floor space that surrounded the bag on all sides. The man stood guard over it.
Two hours later, after enduring countless evil looks from passers by and old ladies who had to negotiate an obstacle course so they could relieve themselves, the man disappeared.
The bag did not.
As the closest person to the bag, people walking through now assumed I was the one who thought it would be a good idea to travel by rail accompanied by a bag the size and shape of a Yugo.
At first, when finding myself on the receiving end of a glare, I tried shrugging and smiling. I hoped the expression would convey an "it's not my ridiculously massive bag, I just happen to be standing close to it, and share your frustration with its existence" sort of sentiment, but from the even more intense looks I got after making the friendly gesture, I gathered it was being interpreted as, "it is my ridiculously massive bag, and I recognize that it's massive and inconvenient, but what can I say? I really need something this big to transport my Kyoto-abrogating American ego."
So after a while, I tried my phrasebook to see if I could figure out how to say, "That isn't mine." Berlitz, apparently not envisioning this situation, didn't have the phrase, so I pieced together, "Das ist meine nicht," which I'm sure is wrong but apparently got the message across. People now began to regard me with a mild measure of sympathy.
As the train continued eastward, the view out the window was of fields covered with snow. There was little sign of people except a few huge power-producing windmills, their blades spinning lazily.
Slowly, slowly, the train began to clear out. The guy with the huge bag came back, grunted as he hefted it, and disembarked. Around the time that darkness began to fall, and about an hour before arriving in Berlin, I found a place to sit, comfortably away from other people, whom I didn't want to offend with my festering stench.
The train finally rolled into the Berlin Zoo station. I disembarked, pulled out my map to the hotel, and started walking into the cold, snowy night.
I figure it was somewhere around the old border between East and West Germany that my hangover lifted and hunger replaced headache as my primary source of discomfort. There was no helping that I had only slept about 4 hours the night before, and though I had managed to doze off while standing for a few minutes here and there on the train, I was tired. So I now chalk it up to a delirium brought on by hunger and exhaustion that almost as soon as I got out of the train station, I plodded off in a not completely wrong but nonetheless not completely right direction.
Experience and memory merge sometimes. As I tramped through the snow on a wide, quiet street in Berlin, I recalled another night four years earlier--a snowy Superbowl Sunday in Bloomington. We'd ordered a pizza--I can't remember what was on it, but it was fairly tame--and the one we got was so thickly layered with anchovies there was no hope of just picking them off. It being Superbowl Sunday, there was no getting through to the pizza place to inform them of the error, so I walked a mile and half through the snow with an anchovy covered pizza to claim something less exotic. A delivery driver took pity on my and drove me back to the dorm.
No such luck here. I finally spotted a street that was on the opposite edge of the map from where I wanted to be, but at least I knew where I was now. Or at least I kind of knew where I was. After heading in the direction of the hotel, circling one block several times, and walking through a deserted and inexplicably open flourescently lit shopping arcade, I spotted the hotel, the Berlin Mark, right next to the Hard Rock Cafe.
The desk clerk's English, while rough, was far better than my German. She provided me with the key to the room my parents had reserved for my brother and me, but said that no one else had checked in yet, which worried me, since my parents should have arrived the previous night. I headed up to the room, set down my backpack, and had no sooner sat on the bed than there was knock at the door.
It was my parents. They had been at the train station to meet me, but somehow I missed them. They had waited around for a while before coming back, which is how despite my perigrinations, I managed to arrive at the hotel before them.
"You look rough," Shorty said. Shorty's my mother. I started calling her Shorty as a juvenile taunt in the 7th grade when my height finally exceeded hers. It stuck.
I explained the circumstances of the trip, not neglecting self-deprecating remarks about my odor.
"You do kind of smell," Shorty observed helpfully.
"Thanks."
We talked for a while, then they headed back to the train station to meet my brother while I hit the shower. The shower was transcendent, a miniature Eden in a bathroom in Berlin.
While I waited for my parents and Cosine (aka Colin aka Malcolm) to get back, I turned on the TV and watched a peculiar series of earnest student films. One had a diminutive young man getting beaten up, then ignored by passers by, then rescued by a pretty young woman. The soundtrack was the theme to Chariots of Fire. Another had a group of people wearing masks shopping.
Poor Cosine's shape was nearly as bad as mine when he arrived; he landed in Frankfurt that morning, then immediately boarded a train to Berlin.
We headed out to dinner at a hotel restaurant up the street. I was tempted by the wild boar, but ordered bratwurst. Shorty did order the wild boar, and it was pretty good. I'm afraid that I was so ravenous--this was my first meal since dinner with Sarah and Roberta--that I was completely absorbed with what I was eating and couldn't tell you what anyone else had.
I slept very soundly.