The Glamorous Life

Oh, and just so that people don't think all of this sounds all too glamorous - I mean, come on, who doesn't long for a big swig of donkey penis-flavored hard liquor (with the obvious exception of my brother Eric, who has informed me in no uncertain terms that he will never kiss me again) - I like to occasionally include in these little sections on the glamorous life. This one relates to train travel, which is, normally, pretty effortless in Europe - although I have been doing a ton of it lately (although I'm finished with it for this trip) - and it's certainly a lot easier if you aren't carrying the world's biggest suitcase, along with three other carry-ons (my laptop [for the dozens of presentations on this trip], my C-pap machine [so I can breathe], and another smaller backpack just to store stuff I need to get out in a hurry - money, my passport, my camera, my cell phone, and Chinese chocolate wafers, etc.). So, the morning after that glorious night in Vienna I had to catch a train to Budapest, and it took me all of about ten minutes to get to the train station on the freakishly efficient Viennese metro system, so I had lots of time to get settled. When my train arrived I climbed onto the last car, and settled down to write in my journal. About the time that we were supposed to take off - and keep in mind that Austrian trains are never late, and that Scrooge was dead as a doornail, or you'll miss the point of the miracle [wait, wrong story] - anyway, I see people piling out of the car in front of me (or, as they were saying, the "wagon") and the story was that the electricity was out in that car so I just figured that people were moving to one of the cars in front or behind and we'd be off in a moment, but nothing happened, and suddenly about fifteen minutes had passed (a lifetime to the Austrian engineers) so I stood up and realized, to my chagrin, that the train had abandoned us, and we were an orphan "wagon" left on the tracks, which, all things considered, was pretty funny, and effectively served as a metaphor for my life. Eventually the train - or some train anyway - came back and picked us up, and off we went.