This first appeared as a comment.
Anne’s story 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.