[This story is one of ten shortlisted in the 2015 Irish Times Amateur Travel Writer competition]
Upon returning from a month spent traversing Europe, I can say that the most memorable experience wasn’t sitting on a giant knob bench in Amsterdam’s sex museum, or watching the sun rise from a tiny beach on the island of Hvar but screaming into the face of a German train conductor on the wrong train, bound for Moscow.
Myself and four good friends had decided to partake in the somewhat clichéd rite of passage that is interrailing through Europe.
Our journey was mapped out: Amsterdam, Berlin, Kraków, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and finally, the Croatian coast. After the winding canals, condomeries and madness of Amsterdam, Berlin’s strange mix of expansive history and hedonistic freedom had us awed, humbled and partied out.
We spent our time between these two extremes of the city’s personality – our days were spent appreciating the stark beauty and stillness of the Holocaust memorial, marvelling at how intrepid Berliners stuffed themselves inside secret panels in cars at the Checkpoint Charlie museum and lolling in the sun in the sprawling Tiergarten.
Nights were spent drinking in squat-cum-bars, running around clubs under railway bridges and staring in wide-eyed innocence at the Barbie like street walkers as if they were some strange clutch of exotic birds. The nights were bookended with falafel, with the most delicious mix of yoghurt, fresh mint and spicy hot sauce.
After four days, when we arrived at the train station ready to depart for Kraków, we were delicate and sleep deprived, weakened from our own gigantic rucksacks and monumental hangovers. What followed was probably one of the most overly dramatic reactions to something only mildly alarming - we became separated. Three of our party, myself included, had boarded the train that had pulled into the station with all five bags. The remaining two had gone off to purchase snacks for the train.
The whistle blew, the train began to chug off and phone ringing, I realised the other two had not made it onto the train. What’s more, we were bound for Moscow, not Kraków, as we had thought. Screaming and crying as if Armageddon had come (how I wish this were an exaggeration) we watched our friends running alongside the train as fast as they could. We could only watch as they shrank into the distance, panting at the edge of the train platform, heads in their hands.
After much looks of disgust from the conductor (after all, we had screamed in his face), we calmed down and managed to communicate what had happened, learning that we could get off the train at Frankfurt, double back and find ourselves back in Berlin after two hours or so. We returned, sweaty and aching, egos bruised, to find the other two sitting on the platform, their faces puffy and red from crying, mirroring our own.
It turned out that we were also in the wrong station and had to wait 10 hours for the next train when we finally arrived at the correct one. I can only blame our massive, pounding hangovers for this. The meal we eventually ate on our arrival in Kraków was probably one of the best we ever ate. We collapsed down at the table in the traditional restaurant and sat silently eating and drinking our fill of Bigos (a hearty stew), bread and wine.
The rest of our trip, whether it was going on a 100-year-old wooden rollercoaster in Vienna or queueing for portaloos at the Sziget festival in Budapest, was undertaken as a group, no man to be left behind. We had learned that the hard way.