Transit

Melbourne Train Girl was left at Frankfurt Flughafen Hbf by her helpful plane neighbour (whose shoulder she had unintentionally borrowed) as he ran for his train to Berlin. She negotiated the signage and found herself at the ticket office. In her most confident German she asked to change her ticket to Prague to an earlier train. The woman at the counter tapped at the keyboard and then looked up and poured a stream of incomprehensible German onto Melbourne Train Girl's travel-weary ears.

"Could you speak slower please," Melbourne Train Girl stumbled over the German, forgetting to use the polite "Sie".

"Would you like English or German?" the woman replied.

Dejected, Melbourne Train Girl carried out the rest of the transaction in English.

Making her way to the platform the sight of fresh, heavy German berad made all the stomach turnings brought on by airplane food disappear. She successfully negotiated a bakery and acquired in German two Bretzeln and a Knöpffler for lunch on the train. Then the discovery of a crepe stall provided her with breakfast.

"Your accent is strange", the Vietnamese man working at the stall said as he spread batter onto the hotplate.

"I'm from Australia," Melbourne Train Girl answered in German.

"Australian!" he cried, and muttered something fast and excited that Melbourne Train Girl didn't catch. He then spread almost half a jar of Nutella on her crepe, much more than the previous girl had been given. Melbourne Train Girl wodnered if there was something thjis man knew and she didn't about Australians and Nutella. She wolfed the crepe greedily on the platform and her stomach turned again. Her own fault.

On the train, which was very fast and very sleek, she struck up conversation with a travel companion of her plane neighbor. It was a jumble of English and German, and as all the lost vocabulary began to flood back to her she felt disappointed she was leaving Germany for Prague where she would neither speak nor understand anything. The landscape rushing by the train window made her feel ill, but still she looked to catch glipses of foreign backyards, some with attached hairdressers or tiny vegetable markets, street art along the edges of the track, and teenagers who should have been at school standing around stations smoking and drinking beer in baggy pants.

She should have stopped looking, but didn't and had to leave her companion to mind her bags while she threw up half a jar of nutella in the train bathroom.