In fact, I have plenty of funny moments to share. Do you remember I said you get lots of experiences and experience from Erasmus? I have experienced many moments, I have been in many new and sometimes strange situations, very often full of adrenaline. However, that's what definitely belongs to Erasmus....doesn't it? So I'm gonna tell you some adventures.
This is a crazy story, with a happy ending of course, how else. I was back home. I mean, since I had a break between the semesters, before the second semester started I came to the Czech Republic for one week to visit my friends, parents etc. This was in the period of a harshly freezing weather. One day morning I was going by train to Brno, where I was supposed to take a plane to Eindhoven.
Sure you can't come to the airport at the last moment but you should always be there sooner. Just in case. And I was supposed to be as well.
The journey by train to Brno was okay. Till one moment. Till we stopped in a village, like 30 km far from Brno. I was just listening to my mp3 player, staring out from the window, as usual. But all of a sudden, we are standing, waiting for something. Ten minutes....okay this is still fine. Twenty minutes..., 30 minutes....Well, this is not fine anymore at all. Starting to be nervous, the ticket inspector got to our coupé and said we were not continuing further by train, because the railway track was cracked, so we had to take a bus that would take us all to the next train station where the rail track was okay again. At that moment it was completely clear I couldn't have caught the plane.
But what could I have done? I tried to contact all potential friends and relatives or anybody who could be eventually able to give me a lift to the airport. But the problem was - I was stuck in some village, not even close to the main station in Brno. Okay, I'm gonna cut it short a little....When I accepted the situation that I was never going to get to Ghent, all of a sudden I happened to hear a girl in the train calling to Wizzair airlines about the
delay
. I started to follow this girl along with her friend, so we could panic together. We kept asking the ticket controller or the station dispatcher about the length of delay but it was absolutely clear that we couldn't have made it. We tried to use the last option and were about to hitch-hike even though there was only a highway close. At that moment, none of us knew why, a women with a car appeared. The girls I was panicking with stopped that car with that women. I don't know whether that women was an angel or something, but anyways, she was kind and she drove us to the airport.....yes we made it.
The journey from Queen's Day
Do
you know this famous feast in the Netherlands? Queens' Day - all Dutch
people "celebrating" the ex-queen's birthday? It's absolutely the most
famous feast in the country. So how could I miss this if I was so close.
Yes, I wanted to experience also this, so I took my orange Holland
T-shirt, which I had actually bought when I was in the Netherlands for
the first time, and set out for the Netherlands.
The way there was
actually good because I went for free (21€ saved) but not to make it
long, I'm going to drop the quite boring part about the journey by train.
Well, there is not that much behind this story -
plenty of people in orange, overcrowded those small and super narrow Amsterdam streets, but okay it was new for me, it was okay.
The point is
that I was perhaps the only guy not staying over the night. Yes,
probably the best of the Queens' Day was about to happen, but anyway, I
was going back to Ghent the same day. And here it comes. I had to leave Amsterdam
quite early because I needed to catch the last train to Antwerp and to
Ghent also. Or...I would probably have had to camp somewhere at a
station or something over the night. I don't know why but the journey
back was unbelievably long. I couldn't wait to be home, take shower
and go to bed.
Everything had been going well till we stopped in
Roosendaal. To be in the picture, there was like 15 minutes to change
the train in Antwerp to get to Ghent that night. And actually there was a "safety" -
one more very last train, a super slow train, with which it
would still have been possible to get to Ghent... you know, if something...But
the problem was that we were 30 minutes delayed because we had to wait
for another train. It was absolutely clear there was no time anymore to
change the last train. Well, I already saw myself in the bed but now I
started to try to see myself at a train station, a bus stop or
eventually a hostel. I don't know if this could happen in my country, maybe, but I can't imagine. I'm gonna reveal you - I got home that night though.
The journey continued like this - After we started up again, a ticket controller
was going through the train asking the travelers who was going to
Ghent. When we arrived to Antwerp, where we were initially supposed to
change for the last train to Ghent, as a surprise there was still a
train waiting for us. Thank God! The final group of stressed out people
said. The problem was that that last train waiting or specially
equipped for us was going only to Sint-Niklaas, which was in fact still
like 40 km far from Ghent. So we went to Ghent but had no idea what
would be going on afterwards. And what happend when a buch of like 20
people remained stuck at the station? We were told taxis would be ordered
for us. And it did happen! I had to wait for a taxi for another hour
because they didn't have enough taxis for so many people, that's what
they said, but what is the most important - I got home eventually!
First Hitch-hiking
I guess this
is for me the craziest experience of Erasmus ever :-D And as the icing on the cake, it happened the very last day of my stay in Belgium. As I said,
for the last day of my amazing Erasmus, there was a plan. And how else
the end of Erasmus could be ended than by making the last trip.
So this
last Sunday, along with my friend and at the same time ex-housemate
from the first Erasmus semester, I went to Dinant and on the way back we
wanted to pass by also Namur. And this actually happened. After a short
excursion to Dinant we set out for the way back to Ghent but we also
stopped in Namur. For the point of the story I must tell, since this was
the last day and also the last trip, we also filled up the last free
row in our Go Pass ticket. Maybe it's also useful to tell what the Go
Pass was. If you travel by train a lot, you can save some money by buying
so called GoPass. It's actually a train ticket for any 10 rides, which
costs 50€ and you can go wherever you want. It means that one journey
costs 5€ then and that is very cheap for Belgium. So, we used the last possible ride
for the way back with a stop in Namur. But
now we are getting to that funny thing! We explored Namur, its
historical center, the Citadel and so on, and in the evening we decided
to go back to Ghent finally because I needed to pack up, clean up the
room and do all that unpleasant stuff...you know what I mean...when you
don't want to go home but have to and...yeah, this situation.
So...we're going back to the train station till I tried to check and take
out the GoPass. Yes, I tried, because the GoPass wasn't in my pocket
anymore! I always stick everything in my pocket (you know I'm a man :-P)
but that was actually the first time I had lost something (tissues
don't count). It was just a ticket you would say, indeed. But it was our
only ticket to get home! Yes, we could have bought another one, even
though it was really expensive for a classical ticket, but we would have
had to have still some money left. My last 5€ along with 10€ of my
friend was not enough for the ride even for one of us. Soo...what does
it mean? It means that we were stuck in Namur, 100 km far from Ghent,
without a ticket, without money at 7 pm basically a few hours before coming back home. I mean the home in the Czech Republic.
So the first
step we took to solve the confounded situation was to try to look for
the lost GoPass on the way we had been going all the day. But in fact it
was just...you know. ...looking for a needle in a bottle of hay. So
sure we didn't find it but we had to get back anyway. Well, I'm going to
the point. Because you can't earn 40€ within a couple of hours, the last chance
how we were able to get to Ghent was to try to hitch-hike. There is one
thing needed to be said - I had never done it before. Maybe becase there
was no reason to do it and maybe because it is ..well it's maybe
quite dangerous in my home country. But there was no option, so we found
a piece of paper and wrote Gent on the one side and Brussels on the
other side and started going a little bit further from the center of
Namur.
We stood at some exit point going out of the city, holding the
piece of paper. I was very nervous, mad, or how to describe it, and
afraid of not getting back finally. And here is what happened. It took
some time though, but to my surprise, some cars started to stop and
then, finally, one driver took us with him several kilometers, somewhere
beyond the city. It was a help anyhow, because now we were standing at a
better place, exactly at a highway entrance. There was a better chance
that somebody would stop. And so it was. We didn't wait for so long and a
very kind woman pulled over and we started to shout. Till we found out
she was going only to Brussels. But still we were again a little bit
closer to Ghent.
Another problem was, she just threw us out of the car before
Brussels, somewhere on the highway. Fortunately, it didn't take so long
and a next car stopped and it seemed we could finally be saved. But it
turned out that we weren't yet. The guy in the car was just going a
different direction so we just moved over a few kilometers. At this point,
those moments were ever the worst because it started getting dark and we
were stuck in the land of nobody, not even in Brussels and still far
from Ghent....
I started to think about one more option - get somehow to
the center of Brussels and gather the rest of our Euros for a train to
Ghent. The only problem was, we were far far from the city center so we
had to solve a dilemma whether to keep hitch-hiking on that side or to
try it on the way to the center. We decided to go on stopping cars and
hope some human being would save us. We waited more than a half an hour
and then we finally convinced two nice women to take us at least to a
petrol station behind Brussels. When we get there I was confident that
we would get home. I believed already. And eventually we did get back home! This spot was a good
place for hitch-hiking - at the petrol station, near the highway going
through Ghent. So we got a lift up to the house where we lived.
Now
it's just a funny story, I always laugh when I remember these moments
from Belgium, but I will tell you guys...the helpless feeling, you don't
have money but you are 100 km far from your home and you need to get
back.....then you get a promising lift just to get a small bit closer
and then you are standing again with a tag and hope that some of the
passing drivers will stop and take you up....Do not wish to experience
it!
