Freakishly Happy

I had a great weekend! I got on a train around 10:00 with a whole bunch of other AYFers. My friend Christine got stuck on a later train that left at midnight, but arrived only 1/2hour after we did. We boarded the train, and immediately were assulted by singing Swiss soccer hooligans. They were everywhere. Filling seats, luggage racks and aisles. We all filtered in to the train, my friends got an earlier start in the queue that I did, and I ended up grabbing a seat next to someone in the program that I barely know.
And the Swiss continued to sing.
I was amazed at how fast some of the girls in my program lost their intellects in lieu of the cute foreign fans. It was incredible. And the Swiss kept singing. The great thing that I've noticed about Europeans is that they don't have to know the words to the songs. They ALL just chant, singing "La" or other random syllables. It greatly facilitates group singing. They wanted us to sing something ( I was not really participating, I had a good start to a migrain and was trying to plunge myself into a book, but I was listening). One of the girls on my program wanted everyone to sing "Sweet Caroline." Okay. I love Neil Diamond just as much as the next person, but would you EVER suggest this song to sing as a group? Brown Eyed Girl, maybe... Chorus line to Rock the Casbah, definitely, but Sweet Caroline? NEVER. Instead they started out on an even more embarrassing note... the theme rap to "Fresh Prince of Bellaire"
This got my migraine going in full swing and I was honestly ready to vomit. I pushed past the football fans to where Jessica, Jennifer, Hannah and Katie were sitting. We had a good chat; they kindly gave me food which placated my stomach after the Excedrin I’d taken to placate my head.
After an hour or so, Jessica, Erich and I decided to go sit in the bike section. We sat, and philosophized, but soon Erich left. And several Tunisian and Swiss soccer fans sat down to chitchat with us. Some were nice, and some were really really gross and drunk.
We went and sat down in our seats, and an especially unpleasant Swiss fan came and sat across the aisle from us. Everyone else in the car was sleeping, yet he insisted on talking really really loudly about really inappropriate stuff. Thankfully he soon fell asleep (in one of the chairs reserved for our group). We too fell asleep and were soon awakened by the exodus of Swiss fans from the train. Our gross friend though was too inebriated to wake himself up. His friends tried several times to no success. Finally I woke up, grabbed the guys leg which was propped on the wall, forcefully pulled his leg to the floor and will some explicatives told him to get off the train. It was a full 10 minutes of his drunk self wandering up and down the aisles before he finally disembarked. A gross side note, the AYFer to whom the seat belonged sat down after he left, and the seat was drenched with substances I don’t even want to begin to imagine about.
With little to no sleep we arrived in Berlin. I split off from the group and read my book as I waited for Christine to arrive. She arrived and we wandered aimlessly about the city in the warm sunshine of morning. After a few hours we found breakfast, and with full bellies we set off to find our hotel.
To be continued…