If there’s two things I’ve realized over the past several days, it’s that trains are complicated and that people are awesome.

Taking an overnight train from Poland, I found myself in a cabin with a French-speaking Polish family. While they spoke too fast for my high school level learning, their son spoke enough English for me to learn that I’d need to change trains sometime in the night. More than that, he told me that I could only stay in the cabin until someone with a reservation arrived, something that happened a couple of stops later.

Like everyone else without a cabin, I found a spot on the aisle floor to lay down on. People kept walking over and around me, moving from one car to the next. Hoping to keep my things from being stolen while I slept, I placed one bag under my legs, and used my other as a pillow. Although it wasn’t the most comfortable, I managed to drift in and out of sleep.

I woke to a knocking on the glass window of the cabin next to me. It was the father of the family I had been sitting with earlier, now outside the train. It took a moment, but I came to interpret his motions assaying this was where I needed to change trains at. I groggily made my way outside and, learning that the only change was that it would just be the last few cars that would be detatched, I made my way to a different car further up.

I fell back asleep, waking again as the train arrived in Berlin. It was here I’d need to change trains, which meant first taking an inner-city shuttle across town to the Berlin-Ostbahnhoff first.

I reached Amsterdam late in the evening, exhausted after a day of uncomfortable travel and a lack of sleep. Checking into my hostel, the receptionist led me up the steepest flight of stairs I’d ever been on, with a ceiling low enough to keep my head lowered. I dropped my stuff off and headed out to get something to eat. It was my 21^st birthday, I’m Dutch, and I wanted to celebrate with something of my heritage. Too tired to spend any time looking, I settled on a couple of Heinekens.