Is It Sticky?

 There is nothing quite as quaint as taking a train trip through Europe. It evokes Harry Potter magic as you rumble through beautiful landscapes. There you are just jostling along on a steamer train.

My only true experience with trains in Europe comes from my J-term trip in Junior year of college. J-term, if you're unfamiliar, is a one-month long "semester" that some colleges do between January 2 and January 31. There are many trips abroad during J-term.

My junior year of college, I signed up for a J-term trip traipsing through the "Art Capitals of Europe" - as the trip was titled. We started in Paris, then to Milan, Florence, Vienna, and ending in Prague. It was a beautiful and diverse experience. We did indeed see a lot of art in many different forms.

But back to the trains. Trains are how we got from Paris -> Milan -> Florence -> Vienna -> Prague...the steamer! It was adorable and old-worldly and also, I'm sure, a lot of effing work for the teachers. As an example, I quite literally do not remember ever schlepping my luggage on board or off. Did we do it? Maybe. But I feel like I would have rememberd that experience. What I do remember was boarding the train and being led by the teachers to a compartment that was to be your space for the next however many hours. And then as soon as the teachers left we would leave the compartment and head straight for the refreshment car and buy ridiculously priced Euro cookies and American sodas. Nothing like paying $5 for a can of Coke, am I right.

On our journey from Vienna to Prague, my teacher led myself and 2 of my best gal pals to a small compartment that had 4 old-fashioned, wooden seats that faced each other. Sitting in one of the seats was an old Eastern European lady looking straight from a movie with her head wrapped up in a handkerchief. She spoke no English but was very smily as us 3 ladies sat down all around her. We all said hello as she nodded and smiled. As soon as the train started moving, she fell straight into a deep sleep.

We left our car and the sleeping Czech woman to go find the snack car. We found it and got packages of Hit cookies and cans of Pepsi. This train was a Pepsi train, apparently. We debated staying in the snack car to eat but there were no seats where we could sit all together, so we took our snacks back to our train compartment.

I opened up my can of Pepsi-Cola and watched as the Eastern European landscape passed by me. I remember the afternoon sun was shining down brilliantly in that way it does in the wintertime. Despite the few sips of caffeine from the Pepsi, and the Hit cookies, and the fun chattering with my girlfriends, I started to get drowsy. We had been traveling for 3 weeks and the sun was rocking me to sleep like a warm cradle. 

I tried to fight the sleep. I worked so hard to keep my eyes open and focus on the conversation to no avail. At one point I fell asleep; I was just sleeping there peacefully in a train car with two gal pals, a random old lady, and a Pepsi-Cola can in my hand.

I was gripping that Pepsi can tightly, as I do, but then I hit that point of sleep where your muscles relax because your brain stops telling them what to do. My grip on the Pepsi can released and I awoke with a jolt as the tin can clattered onto the floor. I opened my eyes at the same time as the old lady and witnessed us both get sprayed with Pepsi-Cola. 

"I'm sorry," I sputtered. She looked at me and kind of shrugged. I was digging through the seat next to me to find some napkins. I was frantically trying to clean it up, my girlfriends were helping and kind of razzing me, and all I could feel was sticky Pepsi all over my skin. Yuck. It was gross. 

As I was again saying "I'm sorry" to the older lady and still trying to clean up all the mess I looked over and the old gal had fallen back to sleep. She was very unbothered by some young American girl spilling an almost full Pepsi-Cola all over the train car and her. I could tell there was Pepsi on her hands and her clothes but there she was asleep. Unflappable in the face of chaos. 

I think about that woman every now and again when some silly accident comes to ruin my day. Sometimes being unbothered is the best reaction you can have. Sometimes you just have to sit in the sticky ickiness and go back to sleep.