Douwe Osinga's Blog: Something rotten on the way to Denmark

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

So I changed the perfect weather of California for the more questioniable variant of North-Western Europe to go to the Readme festival in Denmark. The night train seemed to be a good option to get there, even though it involved a change of train in Duisburg with a wait of 2 hours. Or was it Dusseldorf? And there the trouble started.


The ticket said the train should continue at 11:29, but on the time table it said 11:13. Weird. But not weird enough to trigger an alarm. Also the Donnerplace around the corner was missing. Also not weird enough. There are always other Donnerplaces in Germany.


There's not that much exciting stuff to do around the railwaiy station, so we returned just before 11:00 and noted that our train was not posted on the big board, not at 11:13, nor at 11:29. Again not weird enough, but getting closer. We went down to the track and the train was already there. Not only that, the doors where closing and a guy was blowing his whisttle. Now we got to the point where it was weird enough to panick. We ran to the one open door where a conductor was standing, but he wouldn't let us in and we saw the train leave.


First we thought the train had left too early, but when we checked, it actually said that this train left on 11:13 Monday through Saturday and on 11:00 on Sunday. It was Sunday. Ah, but our ticket said 11:29, right? Ah, but that was from Duisburg and not from Dusseldorf. So we had less than 30 minutes to get to the other city. A taxi driver thought it would take 30 euros and 15-20 minutes to get there, so there we went.


Did we know a street close to the railway station, the taxi driver asked, while fumbling with the route planning thingy. Weird and we were still panicking. When the taxi stopped, the meter said 58 euro and the clock 11:02. We got out and started to run into the direction we though the station was. Also in different directions. There was no railway station.


When we did arrive at the station, the train had long gone of course.

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