The Real Side of Study Abroad – My German Train Experience

Most of everything I will ever say, post or express about my time abroad will be overwhelmingly positive to the point of annoyance. I have been blessed with an extraordinary opportunity that most people would covet, for obvious reasons, and I’m finding my experience to be everything I could have asked for and more. To travel the globe with no real boundaries and restrictions is such an amazing situation, and I’ll always be appreciative of that.

With all that said, this experience has forced me to come to the realization that sometimes I will be more or less alone and I will need to figure things out for myself. Sometimes the situation is minor, like figuring out what train to take to Stamford Bridge to watch my favorite football club play. Other times they will be a bit more major, and dare I say, life-altering.

That was the case in my recent trip to Germany. I was set to take an all-night train trip from Munich to Berlin. I booked the trip myself so I could save a little bit of money, like any good college student would. The train trip I found had four stops along the way, including one that was slotted at three hours and twenty-seven minutes. That’s important, remember that.

Anyway, I boarded the train at 9:00 pm to head north. I got through the first two trains with no real issues. The first train ride was a bit lengthy, but that wasn’t a problem. The second trip was packed to the brim, but I managed to find a seat. To this point, my biggest issue of the evening was UNC’s narrow loss to Clemson in football.

Then we got to Hof.

Hof is a town in Bavaria with a size of about 50,000, around the same size as my hometown of Huntington, West Virginia. It is on the Czech-German border. As a town, Hof is known for its arts, housing the Hof International Film Festival, the Hof Theater and the Hof Symphony Orchestra. It is also famous for the Wärschtlamo, which are street vendors who sell sausage out of a special bronze pot, and Schlappenbier, which is a beer sold only one day a year. And they have a train station.

I pulled into the train station at approximately 1 am. Groggy from the long day of travel and previous nap, I stumbled off the train onto the platform. My first instinct was to find a bathroom. So I walked to the auto door by the bathroom and nothing happened. I didn’t think much of it and went to try another door. So I tried the front door. Nothing.

At that point, a little bit of doubt began to seep into my mind. It was 1:15. I still had more than three hours before my train left and I had nowhere to go except the benches outside on the platform. So I sat down there and put my head in my hands, thinking how big of an idiot I was for putting myself in that situation. I went to check my phone for the time and was delighted to be greeted by the lovely ‘20% percent of battery remaining’ message.

So to spell out the situation – at 1 am on a 45-degree night in an unfamiliar German town, I was left with no place to take shelter, charge my only means of communication with anyone, or even use the bathroom. I was, as they say, screwed.

So I panicked. Internally for the most part. I wasn’t going to spend my night in the cold. I thought for sure I was going to get kidnapped and never see my family or friends again. Make fun if you want and yes it was dramatic, but I was in a bind I’ve never been in before. So, in my moment of panic and self-doubt, I did the only sensible thing I could think of.

I went to the police.

That makes it seem more intense than it really was, so I’ll elaborate. There was a police station attached to the train station, so I figured that could be a solution. I got buzzed into the station and was met by a middle-aged man with a gray mustache. He was about my height and gave me a half-quizzical, half-upset look like he was an officer who was up at 1 am dealing with a 20-year-old American college student. I started to explain my situation, and he immediately told me to slow down because he couldn’t understand me. So I started over – I just got to Hof, my next train didn’t leave until 4:30, could I possibly stay here until my train arrives in a few hours? And with the most patronizing tone, he told me I could not stay there because it was a police station, not a hotel.

I pleaded with him, saying it would only be for a few hours and I didn’t want to be stuck in the cold, but he was having none of it. I opted to give up thinking he was going to help me, so I asked if there was any bathroom I could use. He told me to wait outside.

So I stepped outside, not knowing what was going to happen next. About a minute later, the officer reappeared and told me to follow him. I did and he took me to the front door of the train station and showed me to the bathroom. He told me sternly that the bathroom was to the right and the exit was to the left, and if I left I couldn’t get back in. He then turned around and walked out, not even letting me say thank you.

I’ll attach photos of the station, but I want to describe what it was like first. The main corridor was about the size of a high school gymnasium and was painted a soft yellow with brownish-yellow columns lining the sides. Just off the main corridor was a dimly-lit hallway with the same cream-yellow and brown trim that led to another corridor with the bathrooms. In the second corridor, there were two glass doors on either side of the corridor, with two offices and a bathroom in between. The only seats in the station were three bus station-style seats lining the hallway. The most prominent feature of the station was a clock across from the entrance that clicked loudly every minute. And there was not a single electrical outlet in the station.

I took a seat in the station around 1:35. Still had about three hours until my train arrived. With a phone that was getting closer to death by the second.

I finally got the chance to use the bathroom too. But it wasn’t ideal. I didn’t take a picture of the bathroom because it freaked me out so much. But the bathroom area all came together in a completely dark room with three doors to choose from – male, female and toilet for anyone. The bathroom I used was completely dark, despite being the most well-lit of the three, which made for a terrifying experience. When I got in, the stalls were separated from one another and 100% dark. I fully expected to hear the door open up and for that to be it for me. But it didn’t, and as it stands, I didn’t get eaten by Pennywise the Clown or hacked apart by an axe murderer, so we’re good there.

Sitting in that train station for three hours was probably the most scared I have ever been in my life. For really the first time ever, I was completely alone. I was in a foreign country with no contacts and a dying phone in the middle of the night. I couldn’t find a way to pass the time with Twitter or YouTube because I had to preserve my phone’s battery. I could’ve called my parents, but what could they have done from the US?

I think the best word to describe my feeling in that station was hopeless.

As I put my pen to paper to write that, I realize how stupidly dramatic it sounds. But it’s a realistic indication of how I felt in that moment. I had no one to help me, nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait and think.

But with every loud and somewhat terrifying click of the clock in the lobby, some of that hope came back. I kept a watchful eye on the clock until 4:00, and at 4:00, almost three hours after I walked into that completely empty train station alone, I walked right back out to board my train.

I only waited about ten minutes until my train came. When it finally pulled up, I stepped on board and, after plugging my phone into one the charging ports, collapsed into the seat and let out a huge sigh of relief. Against all of the heightened and unrealistic odds I had put together in my head, I made it through the night. I finished the trip that same day by touring around Berlin and seeing all the history I could in a short time. Eventually, I made it back safely to England, where I’m writing this now. But those three hours will always come to mind when I think of my Germany experience.

So why am I writing this? Why have I chosen to single out one of the only negative aspects of the trip as the subject of this long blog post?

Well there’s a couple of reasons.

First, the whole train station fiasco made a massive impact on me and my time in Germany, and it wasn’t in a good way. I admittedly put myself in a bad situation by booking a train trip with a three-and-a-half hour layover in the middle of the night. But the events that took place had and still are having a deep impact on me as a person. Even as a write this, I keep thinking back to how I felt laying on those bus seats and the genuine fear that ran through my body. I was truly terrified and nervous like I have never been before. So part of it is to get my thoughts onto paper in hopes that it helps ease how I’m feeling.

But the second reason is that I’m proud of myself. I was able to take a bad situation aside and figure out how to overcome it on my own. It was a gut check position, and instead of panicking and shutting down, I overcame it and made the best of the situation. A younger me, even earlier this year, would not have done well there, but I managed to get through it and have a great experience in Berlin regardless. I put faith in myself and it worked out in the end.

I chose to title this piece “The More Real Side of Study Abroad.” That’s not meant to indicate that studying abroad is an alternative reality and that everything I’m doing is fake, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. But part of the reason I chose to do this was to learn a little bit about myself, what I like and what I’m capable of. Ultimately, I’m here to grow up. And that’s real in every situation.

So I’m going to keep on living, enjoying my experience and making the best of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, with one exception.

No more overnight train trips.