For the record, I'd never seen or heard of Before Sunrise or its sequel, Before Sunset. But Cassandra assured me that it was really good and really romantic. And the main protagonists met on a train. I didn't need Before Sunrise to get me excited about train travel. I'm a self-professed train nut. Even four years of taking VIA Rail to and from Ottawa several times a year hasn't dulled the luster. But I eventually decided not to do the whole voyage by train (which would have taken about 4 days and involved going Brussels to Paris, where I would have switched stations to Paris north, then gone Paris to Madrid and Madrid to Lisbon).
But to get my train fix I decided to take the overnight train from Madrid to Lisbon (the capital of Portugal for you geographically challenged readers). It was a good plan: cheap (€52 for a youth seat), environmentally friendly, and allowed me to stay in Madrid an extra day and get into Lisbon at 8am with the rest of the day free to see the sights.
Now the only part I didn’t factor into the equation was the night part. The train left at 11pm from Madrid and got into Lisbon at 8am. That’s about nine hours on a train, sitting mostly upright and not served any snacks (because they assume you’ll be sleeping). Surprise, surprise, I didn’t sleep.
There was a group of about 12 young German men sitting around me, all wanting to talk and make noise and hit their friends that happened to be sitting beside me or behind me. I really wished I could have turned around and hissed something cruel in German. I didn’t. I instead read for a while and tried to drown out the sound of the train with music from my iPod until I fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion. I can’t tell you how many hours of sleep I got, but it wasn’t much and it wasn’t the good, deep REM sleep kind.
But I do have the experience of saying I took an overnight train. And it was mostly positive—minus the Germans. But there was no sign of Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy.
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