Riding the trains through Europe can be a very rewarding and educational experience. At any given time, it is difficult to guess the nationality of the person facing you in the small six-seat compartments. Many of the newer trains have bus-type seating, but the older ones are broken up into compartments, with doors that close and curtains that can be pulled together to give a certain amount of privacy.
Europeans have so many national languages, as well as a wealth of dialects, that it is very hard for even an experienced ear sometimes to pick out the language being spoken. Although I have a bit of familiarity with German, having lived here for a few years, I was completely unable to pick up any words of the language being spoken next to me on one trip.
"Can you please tell me what language they are speaking?", I asked the seatmate with whom I had been conversing in a mixture of my poor German and her excellent English.
"They are speaking German", she said, then noticing my puzzled look, she added, "They are from Switzerland."
"Oh", I nodded. That explained it. Swiss German is about as different to what I normally hear as a thick Scots brogue is to American English.
If language identification is a problem for me, imagine how difficult it is to try to understand the social customs and mores of people of whom I cannot even Identify their nationality.
Some of my more enjoyable and memorable experiences on the trains have been with people with whom I shared no common language. We resort to smiles and frowns, with lots of gestures, to communicate as best we can. With all the finger waving and grunting, we might be on vacation from a school for the speech-impaired.
I will tell you about one of them.
I was on a train from Timisoara, Romania, to Bucharest. The train was in reasonably good repair and fairly comfortable, but took nearly twelve hours to make a trip that could be covered in much less time in more developed countries.
The compartment in which I found myself was full when we left Timisoara, but gradually emptied until there was only an older woman, who might have been around my age, a young girl whom I guessed to be in her late teens or early twenties and a boy who appeared to be about the same age. I assumed that they were her grandchildren by the way in which they related to her. She continually produced food and drink from an enormous carryall bag.
The girl was quite beautiful, but very withdrawn, the boy handsome, in that dark manner of the Romanian men. It had astounded me the day before to realize that I was the shortest person in the room with several students of both ages, as well as their professors, in a university meeting. I am a full six feet tall and they were all noticeably taller, girls and boys.
As the train rocked on, hour after hour, I began to envy the steady stream of food and drink being offered to the young people. There was apparently no restaurant car on the train, nor any rolling cart as I am accustomed to seeing on German trains.
Although Romania certainly has a national currency, it was not then known for its solidity, so German Marks were readily, perhaps even greedily, accepted.
I looked at a bottle of wine the old lady had brought from her bag and offered her some DMarks, which disappeared into the depths of her loose clothing before I could open the bottle.
Surprisingly, the wine was very tasty and of a good quality. Please forgive me for being surprised. Coming to a nation like Romania from the western countries is such a shock in so many ways, it is difficult to know what to expect and I usually try to keep my expectations low so I can be pleasantly surprised. In this case, I certainly was.
Apparently, the old lady was happy with our deal, because she began extracting meats, cheese, olives, bread and sweets from her bag, offering them to me. Whatever value of the money I handed to her seemed to be what the price happened to be. There was no change. If I gave more, she gave more.
After stuffing myself on good farm-style food for a fraction of the amount I would have gladly paid for much worse in a restaurant, I settled back to digest my meal as the train rocked on through the Romanian countryside toward the capital.
Now that one of my senses was sated, my attention was caught by the quietly beautiful girl. Some of my other senses began to demand equal treatment.
Never one to miss an opportunity to capitalize on an unfilled need, the old lady reached over to her granddaughter's dress and began to lift the hem. She cocked an eye at me.
I dug into my pockets to see what was left in the way of money. I don't usually travel with much cash. Most European countries, including Romania, have automatic tellers at the banks and railway stations, where money can be withdrawn directly from your home bank, although it comes out of the machine in the local currency instead of dollars. (Amazing, isn't it?)
