The Night at Bruges Train Station

The Night at Bruges Train Station

I woke up feeling fairly refreshed - well considering I had just slept 6 hours in a train station. I quickly glanced at my watch; we had another hour to kill before the train to Paris arrives. Feeling quite jovial about getting some decent rest and waking up on time, I looked over at Adrienne to see how she was faring.

Oh Shit! Adrienne looked pale, an almost deathly pale! My heart immediately began to beat faster and my mind raced with logical explanations. Its one of those feelings that makes you wake up instantly regardless of how deep asleep you were moments before. Who needs coffee to start the day when you could wake up to see that the only person you know within a 300 mile radius just might be nothing more than a cold corpse?

There has to be a logical explanation though. Maybe she just saw a ghost walking by. Maybe its normal for Adrienne to sleep with her eyes open and I just didn't make that observation until now. Or it could be the more likely scenario and the one that I dreaded; maybe she's borderline hypothermia. Freezing to death in a train station during Winter in order to save 30 Euros, how am I going to explain that to her parents?

I thought back. Before I fell asleep, she had complained about how cold the temperature was. I had given her my warmest jacket, a jacket that I used before for snowboarding. That jacket kept me warm enough in the harshest environments and although it was cold, I was wearing only a fleece in comparison. I thought it should keep her warm enough to survive in a building. Along with my snowboarding jacket, she also wore both her jackets, a sweater, a scarf, a beanie, and her thermals. She looked like a hulking pile of mismatched clothes.

At the very least I thought she would be a hulking pile of warm clothes. I poked her to see if Adrienne was alive. Much to my relief, she was. The conversation went pretty much like this:

William: "Hey. Adrienne. Are you alive?"
*Few seconds of eerie silence passes by*
Adrienne: "Yes."
William: "You feeling ok?"
Adrienne: "No."
William: "Ahh, sorry to hear that. Anything I can do?"
Adrienne: "No."
William: "Did you even get any sleep?"
Adrienne: "No."
William: "Ahh... ummm... Hey by the way, thanks for watching over our stuff. Just to let ya know I got some good sleep in. Why didn't you wake me up when it was my turn? Oh, we should do this more often. You know we just saved 30 Euros?"
Adrienne stares daggers at me.

I got Adrienne to get up and walk around the train station to get some blood circulation going. Whatever it was, she ended up throwing up. To say the least, we never slept at another train station for the rest of our trip. At that point we had traveled to three new countries, seen a lot of amazing new sites, and been in a few interesting predicaments (one which involved some stranger trying to sell us some ecstasy in Amsterdam). Needless to say though, this was the first time in our trip that I was really worried, if even for just a fleeting moment.


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The Amsterdam Story - Sorry, but you'll have to ask me in person about this one. If I don't remember, jot my memory by asking me what was under my pillow.