Shelf Beds and Piano-Playing Nuns

7/22/08

The night train to Paris was quite an experience. When the train rolled into the station, the large group waiting ran to the cars and started piling on so fast it surprised us. Luckily we sensed everyone's urgency and quickly climbed aboard because the train hardly stopped for three or four minutes at our station.

Once on we navigated ourselves and our luggage towards our assigned car. We arrived at the door to our car the same time as our other four companions and proceeded to play a sort of backwards Jenga game of inserting people and luggage into the car in turns. This was greatly aided by the fact that our car-mates were from Canada and for the first time in two and a half weeks Bobby and I could properly converse with people other than ourselves.

The night-train car consists of three shelf beds on either side of a small aisle about two feet wide. When the middle and bottom shelves are folded in they make a long bench seat on either side of the aisle, allowing all six passengers to sit down, three on each side facing one another. We talked with our companions for a few hours swapping stories about food, hotels, the mosquitos, crazy train travel and the general lack of sleep, food, and hygiene. Eventually we folded the shelf beds down and attempted to hunker down for a bumpy, cold, cramped and long train journey.

Bobby and I were on the bottom shelf beds which only had about a foot and a half of room between the shelf-bed above us at its widest point. The closer you got to the wall, the smaller the distance in space, resulting in Bobby and I literally being wedged into the seat cushions. The train got very cold as it wound itself through the alps and the compartment got quite stinky with the combined foot odor of six travel-weary passengers. I think I managed to get about two hours of sleep during the eight that I was wedged into sleeping position. In the morning, I joined Bobby for a cappucino in the stand-up dining car/bar. I drank my foamy java with one foot angled against Bobby's so as not to fling my coffee all over the car/bar. The view was beautiful despite our lack of sleep and largely aching bodies. We passed entire fields of sunflowers as we traversed the last miles of French countryside before arriving in Paris.

As the train slowed into the station, the all of the cars began to empty into the cramped hallway as we all attempted to get off the train as quickly as possible. Bobby, as he had been the night before, was recruited by the car next to us to help the six ladies in there get their luggage off the racks at the top of their car. One of the ladies was a piano-playing nun who traversed between Paris and Rome playing the piano and keeping the faith. Because of Bobby's good deed and I suspect his boyish good looks, the piano-playing nun blessed our travels and so we felt quite sure the rest of our journey would be much more smooth!