Commuted

The day started at 4.30am. My friend had to start an early shift at work and has a long commute, and I had an early train anyway, so we both said left the house at 5am, said our goodbyes, and I slow walked myself and luggage to Amsterdam Centraal, which is less than 2kms away and only took a little over half an hour.

I settled in for a two hour wait for my train, being occasionally bugged (and once abused) for money by homeless people that somehow exist despite the wisdom and compassion of the citizens of Amsterdam. I was only wearing a light sweater since I’d assumed that the railway station would be heated, but I was wrong. When the time came for my train to depart, I was shivering and pretending that I wasn’t hugging myself to stay warm.

The time for my train to depart came and went without any actual train. +5 minuten, said the board. Then +10 minuten. Then, unbelievably, +60 minuten.

I went off to ask an information desk person what was going on, because with a 60 minute delay, I would miss my connecting train in Basel. When I found an information desk, way over on the other side of the station, the attendant, in the manner I’d witnessed in Dutch public transport staff across the city over the last few days, told me I had to sort it out myself in Basel, with an implication of frustration that I hadn’t already worked this out like an intelligent person.

So back to the platform I went, pausing only to have a ghetto moment of crouching on a bustling concourse next to my open luggage, getting out another jumper to put on over my sweater.

When I got back to the platform, the screen had bumped the delay back to 40 minutes, which would be bad news for anyone who’d taken the +60 at its word gone away for a coffee and then turned up after 45 minuten. But then it bumped back up to +50 minuten, and there it stayed until the sleek white bullet train finally showed up. We rolled out of Amsterdam Centraal 50 minutes late, guaranteeing that I’d miss my connection. So Amsterdam pissed in my face one last time, which probably has a special name in their oh-so-open-minded sex clubs.

A couple of hours later, when the conductor was checking my ticket, he told me that due to the delay, passengers for Basel needed to get off at Ehrenfeld, in Germany, stay on the same platform, then get on the next train, which would take them on to Basel. He rattled this all off in heavily-accented English, and I had to chase after him once I’d found a pen and some paper to write down the name of the station and the number of the train. In a rare moment of public spiritedness, or possibly due to the screeches of American tourists somewhere else on the train demanding to speak to a conductor’s manager, the train’s PA system later spelled out exactly what we needed to do, as per what the conductor had told me. When we were just out of Ehrenfeld, most of us collected our luggage and shuffled to the doors.

Then… oopsie, said the PA. Scratch that. You’ll be getting off at Cologne instead. Cue groans from various cohorts of passengers, as the announcement was made in Dutch, then German, then finally English.

This train will be terminating at Cologne, the PA added a few minutes later. For those of you traveling to Basel… well, we heard a rumour that there’s a 107 sometime after one o’clock that goes to Basel, so hey, you’ll probably be fine. If it exists, I guess it’ll be on the departures board. Well, I’m going on my bratwurst break. Peace out!

I may be loose in my translation, but that was the tone and gist of it.

And so just before midday my late train dumped me in Cologne. After seeing nothing useful on the platform, I went to the main concourse to look at the departures board, which mentioned the 107 and/or Basel not at all.

I was not impressed. I had no interest in being in Cologne. If I wanted to hang out with a bunch of Germans, I’d have gone to a BDSM club in Amsterdam.

I noticed that the departure boards on the individual platforms projected much further into the future than the main station one, so logically, if I walked around and looked at all of them, I might see at which one a theoretical 107 was scheduled. I did this, still of course dragging my luggage behind me like an inexperienced hobo, and eventually found that platform 6 had a 107 just after 1pm going to Basel.

To celebrate, I took my own bratwurst break. It was actually pretty good – I can see why train drivers would prefer it to delivering passengers to their destinations.

Pausing only to take a photo out the station doors at Cologne cathedral, which looms darkly over the train station like something Tim Burton might devise with a really generous budget, I shuffled up to platform 6. In the space of literally five minutes, I was badgered by a homeless man selling newspapers, a possibly autistic man wanting to know if I had any refundable bottles or cans on my person (because sure, that’s something I carry around with me), and a bleary-eyed man hiding a mostly empty bottle of vodka behind his back, who just mumbled something at me in German and only needed a head shake to send him on his way.

But the 170 finally turned up and I could board. Unfortunately my seat allocation was for my original train, the 255, and this was no longer relevant, so I just had to wait until the train started moving and find an empty seat. I eventually sat next to a chatty little old lady from Germany who was off to visit her daughter and granddaughter in Freiburg. When I mentioned that I couldn’t find the restaurant car for a coffee, she offered me an apple instead. But if traditional German fairy tales have taught us anything, it’s not to accept shiny apples from old ladies you’ve only just met.

The 170 was trundling through Baden Baden about the time that my connecting train from Basel to Milan was leaving without me. Around an hour and a half later I arrived in Basel, with just enough time to exchange my old ticket for a new one on the 5.28pm Eurocity to Milan, which would fortunately get me into Milan only two hours later than originally scheduled.

When it came, the new train was crowded, and the passengers were a little rougher than the well-bred Milanese who’d accompanied me on the Milan-Basel run five days earlier. The woman sitting next to me had a fluorescently magenta coat, two purses (one hot pink, the other plum), and a cigarette stink cloud that could be detected from orbit, while the man sitting opposite us had an open beer when he sat down, and he cracked a second one eight minutes into the journey. And these were big German half litre beers, not the frou-frou little 330ml cans we have in Australia.

Fortunately both of them, as well as the majority of the other passengers, got off either before or at Bern. By the time dusk fell, as we were riding through the spectacular mountain passes near the Matterhorn, it was just me and a handful of Japanese tourists in the carriage. We arrived in Milan a couple of minutes before 10pm, and after 18 hours on the go, I wearily dragged my luggage to the youth hostel a block from the station.

It was my first youth hostel. When booking my holiday, I didn’t really have any way of knowing that today was the first day of the Salone del Mobile, the highlight of Milan Design Week. Ordinarily this might interest me, but Milan Design Week is huge, and hotel prices go up with demand. Specifically, my nice little hotel room from last week, for which I paid 90 euros a night, was now 660 euros a night.

Similarly, the shared bunk room in the hostel, which normally goes for around 20 euros, was now 109. To judge from my bunkmates – a nice middle class Indian girl, an Italian businessman, a well-dressed Spanish youth and a buff 30-something partyboy who didn’t end up sleeping in his bunk – I wasn’t the only person who was forced into backpacker accommodation by the functioning of the free market. Even as I checked in, the place was full to bursting, with the bar and the foyer crammed with dozens of people chatting and drinking and watching the soccer on a big screen.

It’s not a place I’d normally consider, but there was actually a really nice, happy, friendly vibe. If I was thirty years younger – and not the fearful, socially inept bozo I was at 24 – I’d probably find it a really enjoyable place to stay and make travel friends.

When the desk clerk heard about my day, he gave me an extra free drink token, because he was a lovely Italian person rather than a supercilious Dutch asshole, who would have no doubt chastised me for not already knowing what to do when a train runs an hour late. And so it was that I finished my day with a complimentary aperol spritz in a crowded bar on the opening night of the Salone del Mobile, which was a darnsight better than sleeping on the platform of a train station with the drunks and that one guy collecting their empties.