German train hazzards
So the other day I was reading this post by Brian in Munich about how he is having to extract elderly Germans from his reserved train seats all the time. And while I found the post amusing, a part of my brain was protesting: surely he doth exaggerate about the frequency of such occurrences. Oder?*
Flash forward a few days to my first train trip since moving back to Germany. Ticket and reservation in hand, I board the correct car to find… an adorable little gray-haired German lady in my reserved seat. In my politest High German (have I mentioned that I speak High German? Because two years in Zurich made me almost forget that fact.) I told her that I believed that was my seat she was occupying. She happily produced her ticket so I could inspect it and compare it to my own. The seat and the car were correct. As I was beginning to doubt my own sanity, I asked to see her ticket again… and noticed that it was for a train that ran a week ago.
As she apologetically moved to an unreserved seat across the aisle, it was all I could do to keep myself from giggling and telling her about this blog post I had read…
To be fair, my seat for my return trip was empty when I boarded the train, bringing the statistical prevalence of confused-elderly-German-in-train-seat to a mere 50%. This is on the Munich-Zurich route; statistics for other routes may vary.
* “oder” is the German word for “or”. It is often used as a tag question, with a similar meaning to “isn’t it?” or “right?”
