There are few things in the life of the average office worker that offer as much potential for discrepancy between expectation and reality as the annual summer holiday. And how could it be any different if two weeks in the sun need to make up for all the supposed swims, massages and ice creams we didn’t make time for around our 9 to 5 existence during the other 50 odd weeks of the year.
To avoid disappointment with my holiday plans this year, I came up with an ingenious strategy. For my long-anticipated train trip back to Germany, I set expectations extremely low and envisioned a most arduous journey. And I had a great ally – the German National Rail Service aka die Deutsche Bahn aka THE guarantor of disappointment and dismay.
Last year, 64% of trains in Germany were delayed with journeys arriving under 6 minutes after the scheduled arrival time excluded from this count. If you are lucky and do get on your train, the bins are usually overflowing, the air conditioning is mostly broken, and the on-board WIFI is more nice theoretical concept less actual fact. Which is to say nothing of your fellow travellers. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps poor ventilation causing a lack of oxygen and hence impeding the ability to think straight. In some people the circumstance of being locked in a metal box hurtling through space at over 300 km/hour seems to produce the irresistible urge to consume a feast of strong-smelling foods. Think boiled eggs with tuna sandwiches topped off with a McDonald’s Happy Meal. At this stage, any trip that doesn’t require me to mouth-breathe into my scarf or book an unplanned hotel stay halfway through my journey because delays have me inevitably stranded in the middle of nowhere feels like a win.
My lived experience of train travel in Germany paired with my slight penchant for exaggeration meant that by the time my journey came around I felt like I was going on a survival trip into the Cambodian jungle or about to give a report from a militarized zone, rather than braving the perils of public transport in North Rhine Westphalia.
The morning of my trip, all was on track (ha, see that!) for a dreadful ride. Some anti-Olympia activists had set fire to the high-speed train lines between Paris and Lille overnight. It set off a chain reaction that resulted in a delay to my London-Brussels service, shrinking my changeover time in Brussels Midi to a nail-biting 12 minutes. As we swished through the Eurotunnel, I pictured myself, setting off on a Tom Cruise-esque sprint across 10 platforms with my suitcase full of Cadbury’s and Garibaldi’s. The train attendant played his part, looking at me sufficiently shocked when I inquired about the connecting service I was trying to catch.
But then, as if through a space-time-train warp, the script of my journey changed. Because what I could see in the native French-speaking train attendant’s eyes apart from pity was … nothing. No impatience at how I was butchering his language determined to use any and all opportunity to practise my French. No surprise and over-zealous reassurances about how well I was speaking. Just plain and simple acceptance of the fact that I spoke French with him. For those of us immersed in the toils of language learning, a native speaker’s non-reaction towards our attempt to speak in their language must be the holy grail. Suggesting I walk to the top of the train to be closer to the exit for my change-over, the train attendant wished me a ‘Bon Courage’ and sent me on my way.
Fuelled by this linguistic high, I didn’t run through the train station, I floated (je flottais). On a cloud of nasal e-s and circumflexed ô-s.
In spite of our delay, I arrived at my connecting train, with 4 minutes spare to settle into my new seat. Immediately I was struck by how the air con was working to create just the right coolness (la fraîcheur) level instead of the usual heat-stroke / pneumonia inducing temperatures (I’m looking at you Great Northern Railway!). I pulled out my laptop and started working on this piece, like the intrepid (intrépide) writer I had always dreamed of being, the lines chugging onto my page to the soothing hum of the train. We drove past lush greenery and fields of wheat, their heads bouncing golden approval of my progress. (Naturellement).
All my fellow passengers were fragrance-free peanut butter sandwich munching angels (des anges). A senior gay couple softly read Simone de Beauvoir to each other in French, while Édith Piaf leaked out of my front passenger’s headphones. The train screens showed staff handing out free ice creams (des glaces) to smiling children and for a change I actually believed them. You couldn’t make this stuff up. By the time we pulled into Liège station I was so entranced that even the nearby sex shop with its seedy ‘Cabines DVDs’ looked somewhat quaint.
The magic culminated into a visit to the cleanest toilet ever in Cologne station. As I was crouching down, the toilet radio was playing an upbeat German song with the lyrics ‘Who can capture this moment for us, it can’t get any better’, while the chiming bells of Cologne’s landmark cathedral rang in the satisfaction of relieving myself of two cups of coffee.
So what is the moral of this story? Expect the worst from your travel for the chance of being pleasantly surprised? All those Duolingo sessions will pay off one day? I’m not sure. But maybe for this summer vacation edition of So What Now I don’t have to come to a productive conclusion for once.
Bon voyage.