The German Trains Are s*** Story

The train was pretty comfortable, to be fair, but not remarkably so. Better than the Italians, not as good as the better French ones .

The first real test came when the ticket inspector called. We had got this whole fraud thing down to a fine art. Our tickets came in two parts - firstly, the ticket itself, and secondly, a little booklet where you wrote in the journey you were taking, and the guard would stamp it. We had got it down well - we would hold out the bit to be stamped, whilst displaying the other ticket in our free hand, close enough so they could see it, but far enough away so it would be a little blurry.

So far, we had travelled on a train from Athens to Patras, over the sea, from Ancona to Bologna, from Bologna to Someotherplace, and now from Someotherplace to Germany. And nobody had given it a second glance.

Until now.

The inspector was just about to hand it back, when something caught his eye. He stared. I held my breath. His finger went down to the date. My heart stopped beating. You have to understand, that we were committing high scale fraud. That one pencil stroke had saved us a fortune, and now looked like it could get us locked up. The pen was clearly mightier than the sword.

The Inspector retreated back into the corridor to hold the ticket up to the light. We had, ingeniously, turned the light off in our cabin to make it harder to read. He was a persistent b****** though.

"Oh", he said at last. "Seven. That's tomorrow. You're ticket runs out tomorrow".

"Oh yes", I said, hoping the colour returning to my face and the grin wasn't suspicious. "We've made close shaves an art form".

He laughed. He walked off. We did what we had done every time a fraud was successful. We shook hands, laughed, and then touched wood.

Then we got talking to the young Romanian chap in the carriage with us. He asked us where we were from, and then didn't believe us at first when we told him England. Our insistence on speaking in English with English accents had him convinced eventually.

He was actually a very cool chap. Very intelligent, he gave us loads of information about Romania, and the current climate. Again, we were forced to disguise our ignorance out of politeness, so when he started talking about pre and post 1989, we just kind of nodded.

It turns out that before 1989, Romania was a dictatorship. Now it was a democracy, albeit a corrupt one (Is there another kind?) The only major difference, according to our new friend, was that whereas before Democracy, everyone had money but there was nothing to buy. Now you could buy anything you wanted, but no one had any money. There's irony.

He didn't explain why he was so well dressed, or why he had things like digital cameras and laptops, but we kind of put two and two together. Even now I'm waiting for the e-mail from him to talk further about his business proposition. All he would say to my first (and only) question, of "Is it legal?", was "Kind of".

Hmmm. Anyway, he got the story about me an Marie-Louise, and was quite impressed. Not as impressed as the others had been though. He started picking holes in it, and telling me that it was all very well and good to go to Prague, but if she said no, I should go to Sweden.

I tried to reason my way out of this one, but I didn't want to think I wasn't giving it my all. I decided that, if needs be, I would go to Sweden.

Due to all the chatter, I didn't get to sleep until about four in the morning. We were supposed to be getting off at five to six, and my alarm woke me at half five. Just after it had woken up everyone else.

This wasn't a problem though, as people had interesting things to look at. For one thing, there was an Alcoholic Tramp stood outside our carriage looking at us - a big fat man with a horrific hernia sticking dangerously far from his bloated stomach, that he took delight in showing us. For another thing, the train had stopped.

The next two hours were spent trying to convince the Wino that we weren't about to give him any money. This was achieved with the help of the German chap sat next to him - but even he had a problem communicating with him.

At one point, he was stood an inch or two from my face, staring at me.

"All right, gorgeous?" I offered.

He burst out laughing, and then belched in my face. I pushed him out of the carriage, politely yet firmly, and spent the rest of the time with my foot on the slide door handle. He tried to get it open with all his drunken strength, but eventually us laughing at him and pointing made him give up.

The train had stopped five miles from our station. It turned out that the bridge up ahead was having problems. The locals, apparently, had constructed a bridge of their own over the railway bridge. It had collapsed. A crane was busy lifting it off. We hoped our Bridge Engineer from the ferry was involved somehow in the disaster. That'd teach him.

We eventually arrived in Summerau, only two hours late. We got the next train to Salzburg, and fortunately left Germany. After a few hours immersing ourselves in Austrian culture, we caught a train and were in Prague by midnight.