the journey between before the European Union
by Anne
I blame it on the Greeks, at least the ones that sold Gael and I our train tickets in Athens. We bought really cheap tickets that involved changing trains a few times to get there. Who booked reserved seats in those days? And besides for the price we paid we couldn’t anyway.
Through Greece was easy enough and the overnight ferry from Piraieus in Greece to Brindisi, Italy, doesn’t stay in my memory as being too rough. I think we slept in some kind of deck chairs with our packs at our feet. The trouble started in Italy. At home, I celebrated May 1st International Workers’ Day myself and knew it was a national holiday in most European countries. I just hadn’t realized how crowded the trains would be.
That morning we standing jammed into the corridor between cars with a dozen other people. At one point a conductor shoved his way through and got into a prolonged shouting match with the Italian man beside me about his ticket. At one point the argumentative passenger turned to me, tenderly put his arm around me and smilingly said something in Italian, either to elicit my sympathy or pretending I was his wife. “Sorry, I don’t speak Italian,” I answered to the howls of laughter of the other passengers. At that, the conductor slapped the man he’d been fighting with on the back and pushed his way on through the crowd.
Eventually, Gael and I were able to move into a compartment and get two seats. We’d noticed by then that the train number on our ticket did not match the train we were on, but in the chaos, nor had anyone else.
About midnight, the train rolled to a stop at the border on the German side of the France/German/Swiss border. Two big German border agents thudded down the corridor. They approached two men in the compartment ahead of us and came out holding a carton of cigarettes they’d seized. The two guards then each grabbed one of the cigarette carton smugglers by their back collars and almost threw them down the train steps.
So, as we timidly held out our tickets to the agents, we were prepared when one of them said abruptly to us, “Get off!” We grabbed our bags quickly, exited the train and took refuge in an open air train/bus shelter for the night. It wasn’t much of a sleep on the wooden bench as a few drunks, who had missed the last train, sang drunkenly into the small hours from their benches.
In the morning, I tried in French to get someone to give us a coin, so we could use the pay toilet. I finally had to part with a Swiss 5 franc coin ($1) in exchange for a coin that would open the toilet door.
I don’t remember how because the numbers didn’t match, but we got on a train that went through France instead. I remember going through parts of France I hadn’t seen before like Strasbourg, but I was dozing a lot of the time.
Then, we came to the last border, the Netherlands. When we held out our tickets hesitantly on the train and asked if this was the right one, the handsome smiling Dutch conductor said, “No, these aren’t for this train, but don’t worry. We’re going to Amsterdam and we’ll take you there. Welcome to the Netherlands! Someone will be along shortly if you’d like to order a soft drink or beer.” And when I came back from the washroom I said to Gael, “It is so clean!!”
Things people do when they are young……just one of them.
Ah, this takes me back to my time in Greece. One time I got in the bus in Katerini to go to Thessaloniki – about an hour’s trip. A group of young Germans got on the bus and were quite determined to find their assigned seats and sit in them. Overheard a Greek man commenting to another, in Greek of course, “Oh, those silly Germans. They always want to do everything the right way.”
This reminds me of my travels in Europe, which must have been in the Fall of. 1971. I had just graduated from grade 13, and travelled through parts of Europe with a friend for 3 months. It was a “gap year”.
We took a ferry from Denmark to Oslo, Norway. We had not bought a bunk, but just planned to sleep downstairs on our chairs. But first we went to the bar. My two companions started to get seasick and went downstairs, but I was in great shape, and stayed visiting these two young men from Oslo. In the morning when we arrived in Oslo they invited me to join them and their family for breakfast. I remember trying to explain to them that Canada had more than one time zone, but they didn’t believe a country could have several different time zones. Of course there was no computer map to show them I was correct.
Later we went by ferry from Sweden to Germany where we got on a train to Berlin. We had some Swedish young people in the compartment we were in, and we knew they were going to Berlin as well. When the train stopped and let a lot of people off, we followed their lead and stayed in our seats. As the train pulled out of the station, the Swedish couple we were following looked up, very surprised, and said we had missed our stop. Oops. The whole compartment got off the train at the next stop and explained to the East German police that we had missed our stop. They all laughed at us, but in a nice way. It was a little scary when they took our passports, but after a while, a big empty train came in to pick us up. Our passports were returned, and this huge train took us into West Berlin.
We enjoyed West Berlin, and had an opportunity to go through Check Point Charlie and spend a couple of hours in East Berlin (not at the train station), a much quieter and dark city (few commercial lights on stores) with huge brick buildings. This of course was before Germany came back together.
That is an interesting story I never heard from you before,
I’m thinking that my writing theme right now is not Cities, as much as it is the journey between two places, an apt analogy for the time we find ourselves in right now.
I think you started another theme in your Go West – starting over, finding yourself in a new world.