closely watched trains

I was nine years old the first time I rode on a train. Granted, it was a mystery, dinner-theater train in which I had way too many Shirley Temples and me and my best friend at the time were bouncing off the walls, but it was my first train.

My first actual train would be nine years later in France. It was a TGV from Paris to Avignon and I remember almost nothing of the ride. Since then, I've taken many trains, mostly in France and China, and I've got to say I much prefer them to busses.

Of course, there have been some not-so-good trains.

Last year, my friend and I decided we absolutely must have Starbucks and pizza, which were only accessible after a four hour train ride to the biggest town in the province. We figured (since we'd been living in China for six months by then) that we were perfectly capable of just popping down to the train station on a Friday night and getting a ticket. You should note that not a single shop-keeper/train station worker/cashier in the entire town spoke a word of English beyond 'hello', pronounced 'hallow!" So we packed up a bag and hopped on the bus and rode downtown.

We got our tickets with our meager Chinese: "women yao chu Wuhan jintian." (we want to go to Wuhan today) From what the woman said (of which we understood none of the words), we got that there were no seats left and we'd be standing. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Only four hours. Not so bad, eh?

Wrong.

It was four hours of stinky, sweaty, cigarette smoke-drenched people stuffed like sardines in a can with the added bonus of the fruit cart ladies pushing their way through the inches of space left to breathe shouting, "Shui guo! pingwa! putao! xiang jiao!" Worst four hours of my life. But the Starbucks at the end was almost enough to make up for it. I have no pictures of this occasion but I honestly don't ever want to relive it.

Today, today was not that bad. The train ride was longer but not the longest I've ever had (which was 20 hours from Shanghai to Xiangfan last year. Don't recommend it. Take the high speed train if you can get it!). The stress of this ride came as we crossed the border from Slovenia to Hungary. Apparently in Eastern Europe, it's common for the train workers to change at each border which consequently means you'll have your ticket checked and stamped multiple times.

The train stopped several times for over twenty minutes at certain stops, and since they stopped announcing the stops after I left Slovenia, this didn't help. Now, when I bought my ticket from Ljubjiana yesterday, I asked the woman, "this is a direct train?" and she said yes. Well, at the second twenty minute stop, instead of continuing forward, we went backwards.

I don't know about you, but going backwards instead of forwards is slightly disconcerting and I began to worry that maybe I was supposed to have changed trains somewhere despite what the woman had said. It's happened to me before - when I went to Bruges on what was supposed to be a direct train, we had to change at some station in Belgium.

Time went by, though, and the train worker didn't come by so I couldn't ask. And just when I'd decided I was just going to let the train take me wherever it wanted, we started going back in another direction. At this point, I gave up. I have this habit of stressing over things I can't control and I just stopped. This train would take me wherever the hell it wanted and I would deal with it when I got there.

Luckily for me, all those switch-backs worked out the way they were supposed to and I arrived in Budapest on time and only mildly worse for the wear. Not the worst train ride I've ever been on but not the best either.