This is a (greatly reduced) collection of characters we crossed paths with on our holiday last year. It completes the European trip trilogy - you can read “MOUNTAINS” and “METROPOLIS” at your leisure.
The train from Innsbruck to Vienna is so full that people are pretty much sitting in the luggage racks. The rest of us are standing, faces smooshed into glass or into other people’s faces, thinking how lucky they are to have a seat.
This is really only a very mild exaggeration. In Salzburg, for example, 30 new people and two bunnies (in a comically large portable hutch) boarded our already full carriage. Three people and zero bunnies got off. The ticket inspector, who looked like he’d inspected enough tickets for one lifetime, gave hoarse and defeated pleas for people to move out of vital passageways—such as, ‘Please be not here.’ I saw his point. But there was nowhere else to be.
Eventually we fought our way to a small pocket of air in one of the cabins. I sit on Maddie’s suitcase and quietly weep. An announcement in German comes over the tannoy.
‘He said they are adding another carriage in Linz,’ says a man who, despite our feet actually touching, I had not registered the existence of. He is thirty something. Bearded and bespectacled. He doesn’t smile but isn’t rude, like a lot of Austrians we have met.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘We are actually getting off at Linz.’
‘Ah,’ he nods and squints. ‘To work in the steel mines?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘They have great steel mines here, if you need some extra money for your trip. Where are you from?’
I have the uneasy feeling of waking up in the middle of a game of chess. A game I will ultimately lose.
‘You must get the Pina Colada,’ the waitress says. She is all teeth and hypnotic, unblinking eyes. ‘It is our best drink.’
‘Is it part of the happy hour?’ Maddie asks. Maddie’s scam senses are highly attuned and they are tingling.
‘Oh, mm, you have to get it. You guys. It’s so good. The Pina Colada. It is our best drink.’
Charlotte and I, two of the biggest suckers in all of Milan without any highly attuned scam senses to speak of, say yes. Sure! Why not? And the waitresses' teeth get toothier still, and she beams right at us like we are the smartest people in the world and that we have just made a very good business decision, and she says she’ll be right back with them. We literally never see her again.
The Maître d’ was perfectly civil when he brought the bill to our table. When we expressed some shock—not so much complaining but just genuine disbelief—that the small Pina Coladas were 20 Euro each, his wide smile was both generous and sympathetic.
‘No need to tip,’ it seemed to say. ‘We’ve included a 25% service fee in the bill.’
We arrived in Paris a day after my birthday and went to a cafe that opened my eyes to the magic of the croque monsieur.
When I stood in line to pay at the counter, the waiter, who had been serving us for an hour—and who I personally had detained for five minutes in a tête-à-tête about croque monsieurs and the magic therein—came over to me and said, ‘Bonjour, sir, table for one?’
A sobering first day as a 27 year old.
There is a seven foot dreadlocked man wandering around the Berlin Museum of Magic and Illusions who may or may not be an employee. The staff with name tags do not acknowledge him, but neither do they shoo him away. He does a tarot reading for a group ahead of us with a deck that materialises from somewhere on his person. His front teeth point to opposite poles and he smiles easily and often.
Neither Maddie nor I can get the ‘Bowl of Harmony’ to resonate properly with our chi. You have to clear your mind of darkness and rub the two metal handles until the water trembles. The man watches us with concern.
‘Are you smokers?’ he asks. When we say no his frown deepens.
‘Are you angry about something?’ he asks. When we say, except for this bowl of harmony, not really, he releases a long, slow ‘Hmm.’
He’s a mystic and a kook and the resonance of his ‘Hmm’ cuts right through me, almost trembles the water on its own, as if he has in his possession my deepest darkest most damning secret, he just can’t quite remember how it goes. I am relieved when he moves away to chase a fly—not to kill it, but to give it a kiss.
Maddie has a teletubbies t-shirt that has endeared us to more people in more countries than our accents have. On the train to Amsterdam, a small Dutch boy charged into our cabin and started climbing all over her, firing off the names of the tubbies in between incoherent toddler babble.
He was so overcome with excitement that he did a poo in his pants. No doubt in homage to Stinky Winky, the often forgotten fifth teletubby who was removed from the show in post production.
At the Natural History museum, I overheard an old cockney woman say, ‘I hope them scientists can bring the dodo back.’
Kristen wants to want to jump—I fear it won’t go any further than that. She leant over the railing of the diving platform and called down to us, though we were obviously on our way out, and said, ‘So, how do you like, do it?’ A bad sign.
All told we are with her for an hour. Maddie leads the charge, yes queen-ing her from the pontoon before joining Kristen at the top, even offering to hold hands and jump together in a kind of aquatic death pact. Charlotte chews up a lot of her cloud storage by filming whenever Kristen stands on the edge. I sun myself and say helpful things like, ‘By the time you realise you’ve jumped you’ll already be in the water.’ I may also have implied that Lake Zurich is more afraid of her than she is of it.
It’s strange to want so badly for someone to overcome a personal demon. As if, in a way, it might help us overcome something of our own, and create a real sense of wonder and togetherness and belief that anything is possible. She doesn’t jump. She says she’ll come back next year and I want to want to believe her.
The chef himself wandered out to greet us, seeming confused. It was a one-man operation in a rundown building, bookended by a hairdresser and a phone repair shop. I heard myself say the words, ‘Hi, um, is this a restaurant?’ It’s not often that you have cause to ask this question inside a restaurant.
The answer was… kind of, but ultimately no. Takeaway only place. But the chef was very happy to have us. We were led to the back of the building and seated like special guests at a desk strewn with letters. Chairs were brought from other shops. Access was granted to the staff toilet. Assurances were given that they had the appropriate permissions to serve customers in person on Saturdays, but that we should try not to be too visible from the street. Orders were taken in a messy A4 notebook by the chef himself, who said, ‘Good choice,’ to every single one of our choices.
It was far and away the best meal we had in two months.
At Prague Castle, Charlotte saw one of the pompous ceremonial guards whisper something to his buddy.
‘Hey! That guy just spoke!’ she said.
The guard’s face, which had been in a sort of military smirk, became totally white and rigid. He stood up straighter and yet seemed to shrink. He was suddenly very young, no older than a teenager, and in his big wet eyes there seemed to pass every mistake he’d ever made. With an obvious exertion of willpower he became a sort of petrified statue, the stillest, sternest, most quietest tower guard that the castle had seen in a thousand years of service. As far as I could tell he stopped breathing.
The guard watched Charlotte very closely in his peripheral vision until we moved away.
Sometimes it’s nice to see sights that are off the beaten path—I think the hidden gem we found in Paris is called the Sacre Coeur.
Sitting on the cool stone steps, looking out over the City of Love, a busker appeared. He started playing slow acoustic covers of pop songs with world unity themes.
Beside the busker, a man in big sunglasses dances slightly out of sync with the music. He alternates between conducting the crowd with his index fingers and angrily urging us to join in, pausing only to light his cigarette. His relationship to the busker is unclear. They seem to know each other. They are not friends. And then he starts to sing, swaying now, arms wide like Jesus on the cross, and his raspy tuneless unaided voice is entire decibels louder than the busker’s portable amp.
‘Wearetheworld!’ he scream-slurs, a little out of time and a lot out of tune, with all of Paris behind him. ‘Wearethechildren!’
This is great!
I feel for the person on the diving platform. Not for me either. I think they are designed so that once you are up, while the option to climb back down the ladder is technically possible, the associated humiliation makes it unthinkable.
Some similar experiences :
There used to be a special (indeed "Football Special") train that went from Motherwell direct to Hampden Park (or at least the nearby Mount Florida station which was technically on a different line) for Scotland Internationals. Very, very scary. People lying horizontally in the overheads racks really is a thing.
Fran and I were served all night by the same waitress (lets say Sally) in a now closed restaurant in Pennant Hills called the Black Stump. The meal finished, the bill was paid and the table was cleared. Just before we stood up to leave Sally approached. " Hi! My name is Sally and I'll be looking after you tonight. Would you like to order some drinks to start with?"
Terrific entertainment!
Thanks Gus!