About last week

When I wrote this, I was sitting in the train in Milan not knowing the week would become more strange within a few hours...

The train left Milan with a delay of an hour. By the time I woke up for the eleventh time (didn't sleep that well: the lights went off at a quarter to five and on again at ten past five) the delay was over two hours. Somewhere between Bonn and Kohl (Germany) somebody jumped in front of the train, which did no good to our delay. After standing still for two hours, we started moving again. But the train didn't go very far. It was cancelled at Kohl so I needed to find some other way home. After another two hour waiting in Kohl I took the ICE to Amsterdam. Home with a delay of more than five hours, and a hell of a story to tell.

No gruesome details, luckily there was a notartz from the Deutsche Bahnhof so they didn't need me (although I did offer three times, after all I have taken an oath). No bloodspatters or bodyparts stuck to the windows (although I was in the foremost carriage) and we weren't allowed outside the train. Most of the trainpersonnel did see the result, 'coz some of them were quite panicky. It was definetely ruled suicide by the polizei and it was succesful.

When they were clearing the tracks, I talked with an American named Brant. Which was just as bizarre as someone jumping in front of my train. He was just a few years younger than me, going to university major in 20th century history. We talked about the elections, he was a republican which made it quite interesting. As he said "I'm not a racist, but where I come from the blacks just don't like the white and the white don't like the blacks". (Something I only know from history lessons and movies.) Talked about other things too, like socialism, carrying weapons and global warming. He did like the principle of socialism, and he liked to visit Europe 'coz somehow we made it work. But it wouldn't work in the States, he said. Middleclass people just didn't like to see their money go to the lower class, and there are a lot of middleclass people in the States. In his opinion the right to carry arms is a good thing, 'coz when they first came to the States they were forced to defend their land from the people who already lived there (?!). Ow, and he "just didn't believe in global warming."

It was a real interesting talk, but left me with a bit of a culture shock. Which is, offcourse, to be preferred above the shock some others in the train had...

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pvjsknwznrt (Email) (URL) - 06-03-’10 13:53