Our European Train Rides, Ranked

Eating crickets, crashing bachelor parties and neglecting our salads.

I’m sitting on a train, looking out the window at the landscape, all rolling hills and grazing sheep and leaves sparkling in the wind. My head is full of ideas, and they’re flowing effortlessly out of my hands as I write the world’s most beautiful blog post. It will definitely go out on time, and it will attract tens, if not millions, of new subscribers and fans. Many years after I die, they’ll open a museum about my writing, (despite the millions of fans, historians agree my work was still never sufficiently appreciated in its time), and this blog post will be one of the main exhibits. In fact, maybe they will make a whole museum simply about this blog post.

This is how I imagined our train ride from Germany to the Czech Republic last week. I am sure you’re as surprised as I am that that that’s not at all how it went.

We just spent spring break gallivanting around Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic, leaving our hearts full and our bank accounts gasping for air. Our train rides were mostly, though not entirely, successful. They are listed below, in the order that they happened, with rankings.

Geneva to Zermatt (second place)

This journey was flawless. We accidentally sat in first class on both legs of the journey. On the second one, the attendant checked our tickets and whispered to us, “This is first class.”

“Sorry,” I whispered back. “Should we move?”

“Nah,” he said. “Just know for next time.”¹ As if we were going to regularly be taking the train from Geneva to Zermatt.

This train ride does win first place for best views, though.

Zermatt to Zurich (fourth place)

Shortly after we got on the train, my eyes started watering. They do this sometimes. They get light sensitive and pained and I have to close my eyes for awhile. I asked an optometrist about it once and she was like, “Yeah, wow, so dry. Use eye drops and a heat compress.” I applied eyedrops rigorously, put on both mine and Jeff’s sunglasses, and tried to cram my eyes open to see Swiss landscapes every once in awhile.

When we switched to a new train, my eyes were mostly better, but it was so crowded that we had to stand up for most of the two-hour journey. Not the end of the world. We got to make nice small talk with a Swiss woman who was stuck in the standing area with us.

Zurich to Munich (third place)

Having learned our lesson from last time, we reserved seats in advance. Great journey, no notes. Started reading Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Kafka is the most famous writer from Prague, where we were going after Munich, and it felt rude to go to the city without having read any of his work. Plus “The Metamorphosis” is like 50 pages, so no big deal.

Munich to Prague (first place)

Having apparently unlearned the lesson we learned two train rides ago, we bought our tickets too late, and the option to reserve seats was no longer available. This was our longest train ride, almost six hours, so we decided we’d just arrive early as hell so we could rush the train and find two unreserved seats before anyone else could take them. This went quite well, as we were practically the first people on the train and we had no problem finding seats.

I had, like, 15 goals for this train ride, which is emblematic of my personality. I like to set unrealistic and unachievable goals so that I will never feel fulfilled!² First, I needed to finish the Kafka book. Then, I would write a journal entry, study Spanish, write the blog, study more and edit the blog. (It wouldn’t need much editing, surely, because it was already going to be effortlessly excellent, as I mentioned.) If I had some extra time at the end, I would read. Leisurely.

I pulled out my book, and more and more people started filing onto the train. Two or three of them were carrying big old milk crates full of beer. Two German men sat down across from us on the other side of a little table, putting their luggage overhead and trying to cram a cooler beneath their seats. They were clearly part of a larger group, as they were talking to men in several other aisles.

I thought people were trying to transport German beers to the Czech Republic for later consumption, but they were dug into almost as soon as the train departed. So many beers were opened in such quick succession that it sounded like bubble wrap. Someone slid a platter of bread, sausage and mustard on the table in front of us (not for us, for the people across the table from us). The German being spoken across aisles and rows grew increasingly raucous.

I was able to make it through the book, write my journal entry and study Spanish for an hour, feeling like a total dweeb the whole time as the Germans talked and laughed and drank. We had brought some snacks onto the train, as well as two prepackaged salads to eat for lunch. When Jeff asked me if I was hungry, I told him I just wanted a snack.

“I just don’t feel like we can eat a salad in this environment,” I whispered, ashamed. “It would feel too lame.”³

I got out my laptop to try to start writing a blog post, but I soon realized I was in the middle of living what would be a more interesting blog post anyway. Someone brought over mini alcohol bottles of some kind of toxic-looking pink liquor. He held one toward me and said something, and I blushed and said, lamely, “Sorry, I don’t speak German.”

“Ah, well does he want one, then?” the man asked in English, gesturing toward Jeff. Jeff accepted.

“It tastes like strawberry that has never seen a strawberry, or the sun,” said the man across from Jeff. “It’s good for getting drunk, though.”

And so our interactions began. Jeff asked if it was common to bring so much alcohol onto a train. The man, who was called Tobias, said it wasn’t uncommon, though maybe it was uncommon to see at 11:30 a.m., like it was now.  The thing was that Tobias and his nine friends were having a bachelor weekend to celebrate the marriage of one of their friends.

“It was supposed to be 11 of us, but one of our friends was having issues with his stomach,” Tobias added. “He has a large stomach. Sort of an American-sized person.”

He was joking, and they were probably three beers (half-liter beers), plus the strawberry thing, in by this point, so this sent one of his friends into a fit of laughter. “AMERICAN SIZED PERSON!” he wheezed, then looked at us, two people who are, technically speaking, American-sized, still laughing, and choked out, “Sorry!”

After a few stations, another bachelor party joined the train. This one was quite obviously a bachelor party, because there was one guy wearing a tutu, a sash and a little pin that said “Bräutigam,” which I could only assume means “bridegroom” in German. The parties mingled and cheersed. The new party was going around selling edible bugs. Like, seasoned grasshoppers and stuff. This was presumably to raise money for the bachelor weekend, and because they thought it was funny. I bought some crickets for myself and mealworms for Jeff, you know, for a good cause.⁴ Jeff offered some mealworms to our seatmates, who had by this point given us a couple of our own beers.

“Back in the day, we would drink beer until we didn’t like it anymore, then we would switch to cider,” Tobias said. “Then we would drink cider until we didn’t like it anymore.”

“What did you switch to then?” I asked.

“Back to beer.”

Ah to possess the simple wisdom of a drunken bachelor party participant.

I didn’t even get into the bottle of peppermint liquor that was going around (pictured, empty, on the left). Faces cropped to protect the innocent.

It was the most fun I’ve ever had on a train, chatting with our new friends about Germany and bachelor party traditions and differences between Europe and the U.S.

When we got off, we watched a drunk guy (one we hadn’t been talking with) try to run down the up escalator for fun. He tripped and fell, dropping his beer and getting off the escalator in shame. The beer clattered down the escalator, stuck falling from the same position over and over again. Legend has it the beer is still falling from the same spot to this day, to commemorate the lost bachelorhood of Hans and Wolfgang.⁵ I can think of no better tribute.

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Question of the Week: I made a dumb joke about how I was trying to write my blog post, when I realized I was living through what would later become a blog post. This is kind of an interesting topic to me. If you are a writer or any kind of artist, do you find it difficult to find a balance between when to write/create art and when to just kind of be in the world and soak in potential ~inspiration~ for your writing/art?

Recommendation of the Week: Honestly creepy how this 11-year-old Portlandia skit about being stuck in a “technology loop” feels even more relevant today.

Thanks for reading!

1. I also made slow but steady progress on the book I was reading, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” but in Spanish. I figured I could manage it because Ernest Hemingway is known for his economy of language, but this book had way too much fish vocabulary. I kept looking up words and finding out they meant, like, “mooring” or “tight-meshed brown fishing lines” and other words I never even use in English. It was a struggle.

2. As a kid, if my parents said we were going to a restaurant 30 minutes away, I would sometimes bring three chapter books to read in the backseat of the car JUST IN CASE I finished the first one, then the second.

3. RIP to those salads. We accidentally left them on the train. :/

4. They tasted like salty dust, which was much better than I expected. Also, counting “The Metamorphosis,” this turned out to be a pretty insect-heavy train ride.

5. Never learned the bachelors’ names, but let’s go with Hans and Wolfgang.