Miss Peach

I am positively dying to go somewhere outside of the US. I haven't traveled anywhere new in so long I practically forget what it's like. A year and a half ago, I nearly went to India for two weeks, and I bailed because I couldn't so much afford that trip. I know it's a good thing I didn't go. But still. I really do wish I had, despite the fact that it would have meant months of ramen for dinner.

Anyway, all these thoughts of travel have got me thinking back to my semester studying abroad and some of the crazy stuff that happened. I lived with an extremely dysfunctional family in Paris. Going into this would be a post in and of itself, but suffice it to say that the mom was crazy, and though the son was very nice, they both refused to speak French to me. Oh! And her daughter got arrested not once but twice while I was there, for committing check fraud with her boyfriend on an OLD BLIND WOMAN. And they were supposed to feed me two dinners a week and I got about five meals the entire time I lived with them. Anyway. They were a strange bunch.

As a result, I traveled a lot, which was great. One trip was to Italy with Eve and Maureen. Maureen was a nice but odd girl. Eve is still a very good friend, who also happens to be my best friend from high school's best friend from college (got it?) and we just happened to do the same program. Random! But really fun. Eve is a great girl and thank god she went to Milan with Maureen and I b/c Maureen went off her rocker at one point, something having to do with not being able to buy cigarettes I think?, and stopped talking to us. It was really strange. Anyway, Evie and I had each other to make it through, which was a good thing given what happened on our train ride home.

We took an overnight train from Milan back to Paris, so we had reserved three spots in a six-person couchette. When we got to the compartment, two girls had taken the top two couchettes-PRIME positioning-so we took the middle two and Maureen took one of the bottom ones. (Since she wasn't talking to us, there was a lot of huffing and sighing and mean stares and hair flipping.) And then Passenger Number Six arrived: a man who had awful body odor and a passport written all in arabic, and an empty backpack with one bottle of water in it. Strange, given we were on an overnight train to a city hundreds of miles away in another country, right? Eve and I were wary and discussed in the hallway how it freaked us out and what if he was a terrorist? Like, oh my god! Then we decided we were profiling and maybe he was going to start life over in Paris! Who wouldn't? So we dropped it. The train left, we all put on our headphones and went to sleep, his body odor (he was below me) wafting up and preventing slumber for a bit there.

The next thing I remember is waking up and realizing the train was stopped. I figured we were at the border or something. We stood there for a longish time, and then suddenly there were LOTS of loud footsteps in the hall coming down the car. They stopped outside our door and then there was a lot of loud pounding and men yelling "POLIZIA! POLIZIA!" in the deepest, most intimidating voices I've heard. I was paralyzed-I didn't know if I should open the door or just lay there and why the hell were they pounding at our door? Eve and I both sat up a bit and looked at each other; I could make out just enough of her face to see that she was terrified and I must have looked the same way. At this point, I was groggy and so disoriented that I had completely forgotten about Passenger Number Six and his empty backpack with one bottle of water.

Suddenly, the door busted open and I recall them literally HAULING the guy out. It happened really quickly-they basically grabbed him and he was gone in a flash. The train sat there for like another hour, and then went on without him. We all eventually fell back asleep and woke up in Paris, groggy, wondering what the hell happened. We never did find out.

So that's odd, right? But here's what gets me. I was talking to my parents a few days later and told them about it-how terrified we were, isn't that so creepy, what do they think happened? And they were both hysterically laughing at me on the phone. Now, if YOUR daughter had been on an overnight train in a foreign country and a man had been hauled off by the police, would you find that funny? I don't think so. I found it slightly disturbing that they found it oh-so-amusing. It's the one time I've wondered if they were crazy. Well, that and the time my mom got drunk on Christmas and started talking to the balls hanging from her necklace, but I later realized that she wasn't really drunk and was just messing with me. But that's another story altogether, isn't it?