One thing about my travels is that they are so flexible. I have an EU Rail SelectPass, which gives me ten days of travel, as much as I want within each of those ten nonconsecutive days, over a two month period. Terribly handy. As a result of this, I save money and do not need to make my plans horribly far in advance. And, if I miss a train or decide to take an earlier one, or anything else, I can do so and rather easily at that.
This has come in handy once or twice so far when I missed a connection due to a late arrival, and would again prove infinitely useful again this day, my day of travel from Brugge to Nürnburg. We were scheduled to make our way from Brugge (with a few stops, of course) to Frankfurt's airport and train station, or perhaps a train station that's merely really close to the airport. Either way, it was named Frankfurt Flughafen, which means airport, and it was a train station. I'll leave the delicate semantics of it to another time.
Apparently the day I left Brugge was a bad day for Europe. An enormous storm had been ravaging the continent and ended up killing more than a few people. Power outages, debris strewn about, and so on were the general order of the day. I said apparently because the train on which I was travelling didn't see so much as a drop of rain. Grey (gray? I always forget which is the American spelling, and prefer the letter e) skies, to be certain, but no horrible storm from our point of view. Yet the effects of the storm's earlier passing were indeed felt when our train came to a stop perhaps five kilometers from the station. Walking distance, really, even with one's luggage.
This stop was no mere small delay, as the conductor got on the PA and announced to us in no uncertain terms that they were uncertain as to when we'd be going again. It seems that a tree had managed to get onto the tracks. This dismayed everyone but me, as while I did have a travel plan, I was not unduly worried about arriving at my destination at any particular time. As seems to be the case when there is any delay of more than a few minutes, we began to speak to one another in the train. I met a nice woman named Nicole perhaps in her thirties and a girl roughly my age whose name escapes me, and was sitting across from a kindly old man who looked about as stereotypically “Old Man German” as one can imagine without leiderhosen and a mug of beer in hand.
One thing mentioned by the old man and agreed upon by Nicole was that the tree on the tracks was rather unusual as there's a rule somewhere that trees cannot be within 20 meters of the tracks. Of course. It'd keep the tracks from having trouble every time there's bad winds. Or so I said to the others who all agreed with the old man, but I knew in my mind it was a load of baloney. As I type this we're traveling through a forest on a different train and there are trees awful close to the train at times. Myth busted.
Another thing that became stranger still was the next update we got from the conductor. In America if one's plane is late you usually are told the bare minimum of information, probably not actually related to whatever problem there was anyways. Here in Germany they were frighteningly specific. We were told that the train was stopped, and would remain stopped for a rather long time but uncertain how long. The tree on the train tracks was on fire, by the way.
Wait, what? I must have misheard in German, or forgotten what the word was that I'd heard.
I asked Nicole after the announcement if I'd heard correctly. “Oh yes,” she said, rather nonchalant about the matter. The tree on the tracks was indeed on fire. Good job understanding!
My slight pride at understanding the rapid-fire PA system German notwithstanding, I was somewhat concerned, and my concern grew once the conductor came back on the PA, now in English. It seems that not only was there a tree on fire on the tracks but the entire Frankfurt station was a madhouse, with many many trains late or canceled and so on. We were advised to stay on to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and transfer there if that was at all doable for where we wanted to go, as once we started going again it'd probably be easier to get around and that less trains were late there. Now that I write this, we might have been near the Hbf and told to stay on to the airport, but I can't remember and fortunately it's not a big detail.
I went on my computer and used my USB internet dongle to try and check the Deutsche Bahn website and find a timetable to see what was late and on time and so on. The site was completely down, probably an inadvertent DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service, basically when way too many people try to connect at once either accidentally or maliciously.) It was at this time I found out Nicole was going to Nürnburg as well, and I asked her if once we arrived wherever she felt was best if I could tag along, and she said yes.
So I settled in for the long haul, as it seemed that whether or not a large storm was in the area at the moment we would remain there for quite some time. I jokingly said we could all watch a movie, and everyone looked at each other and then to me and asked what I had. Huh. Well, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, all three, in German. Oh yes, that will do fine, let's watch the first one! In English!
English, huh? I'd been stumbling around with German for a good couple hours during the train ride so far with the old man and then continued on with Nicole and the other girl since we'd stopped, and we could have been speaking English? Ah well, it was awful good practice and opened me up to code switching when I needed it now. (Code switching being the sudden change of language, perhaps even mid-sentence, in my case used when I don't know a particular word in German.)
So I loaded up PotC into my computer and put it on English but with German subtitles, as I think the old guy's English was not terribly good. But we all agreed that the voice acting is always best in the original language. I set the computer on a little table in the train and we all sat on the opposite side and watched the movie. It was fun, actually, and really helped the time pass. We finished the movie perhaps ten minutes before the conductor got back on the PA and said that the tree had stopped burning and had been moved from the track, and we'd be on our way soon. Hooray!
The rest of the train trip was relatively uneventful, and we stayed on past the first stop and got off at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (I think, as I said it might have been the airport) where things picked up again. The station was completely packed to the gills, people everywhere. I stuck close to Nicole since she knew German better and had more motivation to get home quicker. We passed right by the service desk which had literally hundreds of people in line, a crazy sight. We found a timetable board and then a train that would bring us to Nürnburg, arriving fairly soon if all went to plan. It somehow did, and we got on that train while hundreds of other travelers would be stuck waiting for directions from the service desk for hours possibly. Hooray for savvy traveling! The rest of the trip to Nürnburg was also uneventful, and Nicole and I watched the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie together, getting most of the way through before we arrived. On that note, I really like this new computer I have, the battery lasts for well over 6 hours even when watching movies.
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