There Are Perfectly Good Trains in This Country, Frankfurt, Germany (Aug 2005)

I disembark from the slowly chugging commuter train and exit the station. It’s been a fun weekend visiting Kris in her hometown of Mainz, I haven’t seen Berlin or any of the tourism highlights of Germany but I think I enjoyed this more, seeing a small German city with someone who lives there. It’s time to go back to Amsterdam, though, I need to back by early morning, and much as I wish I were transferring smoothly from a slow train to a faster one I’m not, I’m headed to the parking lot to the bus stand.

It was a tough decision to choose bus over train, not really difficult because the price differential was enough to get me on a budget Eurolines bus but difficult to give up the romance of trains in Europe, the ease and civilization and speed of the thing. I know its possible to travel by train in America but it doesn’t feel the same, doesn’t feel like a romantic trip back in time fifty years to when people traveled with trunks or fleeing an encroaching army with an elaborate hat on. It’s not like this is the Orient Express or anything, it’s just a train and the romance is in my head, and apparently romance sells relatively cheaply at a price point of around $40, which is the difference between what a train ticket would have been and my bus ticket.

It’s late when I reach the bus stand, not middle of the night late but late for this country where nothing is open 24 hours and in fact after 8pm you are going to have to pay a premium for any services or products. The bus is supposed to leave in around thirty minutes and drive through the night, arriving in Amsterdam at 6am or so. There are a few others waiting there, I join them but don’t greet them, two days here has reinforced my monoglot humility and while they probably speak English I sometimes get a little tired of being the American with no languages. I speak French, a little, and I tend to protest this at some point or another in any conversation, but I don’t speak it that well anymore and everyone speaks English anyway so I end up letting everyone condescend to me.

It is a pleasant summer evening, a comfortable night to pull up a chunk of pavement and sit outside. I lean back and muse over the past couple of days, the statue of the river spirit on the winding banks of the Rhine, the jazz festival we went to and the house party later that night, the beautiful jewel of a church with stunning stained glass windows by Chagall. A fun time and I wish I could bump around Germany a bit more, maybe go see the Reichstag after all, but I am out of time and money for this little jaunt and I need to be back in Holland by the time the sun comes up and so here I wait for my budget bus to serve as an uncomfortable traveling bed tonight., leaving the romance of those trains coming and going on vectors flung across the continent inside the station.

And waiting. The bus is late by now, not terribly late but this is Germany after all, Western Europe and things are supposed to be on time here. I consider walking into the station for a snack before it shuts down completely for the night, but I know that Murphy’s Law applies here just as much as it does everywhere else and if I do that the bus will screech into the parking lot, everyone will leap aboard and I will be left here holding a candy bar in bewilderment.
And waiting still. We are Westerners, we wait politely but anxiously. I am still not really talking to anyone, and as a slight delay of fifteen minutes stretches to thirty and then forty-five, the loose collection of disparate strangers begins to coalesce. We have nothing in common but a shared point of departure, a destination, and a schedule, but that is all it takes to bridge social conventions sometimes. I watch a couple begin to chat with another couple, there is an examination of the sign and a brief huddled conference, a phone call is made in rapid German. Another two people join the clump of four and I am the only one sitting separate now, I’ve thought of doing something but I don’t really know what there is to be done, the bus should be here but its not, I can’t think of any action I could take in this country where I don’t speak the language and don’t have a context that would manifest a bus. I could have figured out a missing train, just get on a different one and spider through all those crossing vectors, take the scenic route, but the trains are all gone for the night now, it’s Sunday and its late and we are a group of strangers hanging out in a deserted parking lot with no bus to validate our presence. This is not supposed to happen in first world countries, and yet c’est la vie, here we are. I don’t know the German for that expression.

A lanky man breaks off from the clump, an ambassador sent to recruit me towards the shared goal of bus manifestation, or perhaps more accurately to humanely help the stranded foreigner, more stranded than they by the simple fact of my clear foreigness. He introduces himself in accented English, doesn’t even bother testing me with German or Dutch. They have called the bus company with the righteous anger of first world travellers, and he tells me that they were told that the bus is late. We figured that part out. They also said the bus was coming. Sometime. It has to come this way sometime, this is the route. Also immensely helpful.

I move over ten feet and become part of the group, solidarity, and listen while a young woman makes the next call. More rapid, agitated speech in a language I don’t understand, and a frustrated farewell at the end, punctuated by the abrupt snapping shut of a cell phone. More news, there will be no refunds, exchanges, discounts, or vouchers, we have been instructed to read the back of our tickets which clearly states that there will be no refunds, exchanges, discounts, or vouchers for our trouble. I can’t read it, it’s in Dutch, but I’ll take their word for it. The woman’s face twists as she says, “This is why it’s so cheap,” and we all concur that we are being abominably treated, yes it is an economy bus but we are in Western Europe. I guess the motto is that if we wanted first world service we would have ponied up the extra $40 and gotten on a romantic train.

We continue to wait. We haven’t been given an ETA on the bus, just “sometime,” and this isn’t even the Mediterranean with siestas and manana time, this is Germany, former home of lockstepping Nazis not to put too fine a point on it. I have been fairly sanguine about this whole thing, as it’s all entirely out of my control, but we are now all comparing notes about where we need to be and when, and how much this is inconveniencing us and may disrupt further travel connections or arrangements. I had some time to burn, but this tardy bus has already burned through most of it and I am beginning to fret as well.

We discuss options--perhaps we could just rent a car and pile in, drive through the night on our own? If we split the cost it wouldn’t put us out that much, although nobody wants to blow the budget that way, we are all waiting for the bus because that $40 meant more to us than comfort and it would just stink to blow our modest savings on a triage solution, but we do need to get from here to there. There are other problems with this plan, the first being that it’s late, where would we even find a car rental agency? We send an emissary to talk to the night guard in the station, he comes back and informs us that we can call a special service that will bring us a rental car for an additional charge. The bus still isn’t here and this is looking more and more like a necessity, but wait there are other issues to overcome with this plan--does anyone know how to get there? I don’t, clearly, but the young woman does, she can navigate but doesn’t have a valid driver’s license. Hmmm. New problem, does anyone have a valid license?

Well. I do.

And suddenly this is starting to seem like a grand adventure, a madcap midnight drive with a carload of strangers across Europe, I warn them that I’m not a very good driver and I don’t really know how to drive a stick shift, automatic only, but we are beginning to convince ourselves that this is feasible. We will wait another ten minutes for the bus and then we are taking matters into our own hands, we will be cowboys not cattle and hopefully the American girl won’t drive off the road and hopefully the German girl actually knows where she’s going and this is going to be a story for sure.

The bus pulls up five minutes later.