The banes of our existence

When on a train for five days straight twenty-four hours a day, having a creative mind whilst thinking of activities is a great bonus, as Julia and I quickly came to realise. To keep ourselves occupied we played cards, played games, told jokes and funny stories....until Mooreen, shockingly, told us that she hated doing all of the above. She gravely shook the foundations of our friendship with her. We needed to come up with other things to do, she introduced us to hoopelling in Dutch or skipping in English. This we did up and down the carriage corridor to the amusement of Mama Babs for about twenty minutes, we quickly decided that gymnastics would be more fun. Cartwheels, summersaults and a few backflips were followed by applause and manic laughter from an over enthusiastic crowd otherwise known as Badonk. We bored of this when we realised that the jolts from the train may cause foot through window breakeage.

Acrobatics in the Corridor

Superman

Just being plain sexy

When we weren't having lots of fun we were doing other everyday things one has to do such as eating, sleeping and using the bathroom. These normally uneventful actions became the banes of our existence. Living on noodles and porridge for breakfast, lunch and dinner for five days is a horrific experience. It felt like we breathed, ate and slept noodles and I am sorry to say that noodles is something I cannot eat anymore without thinking of "Noodlepoo" which is what Mooreen said the bathroom smelled like.

Thinking about noodlepoo

This brings us on to bane number two: The Bathroom. A small unpretentious room with a basin and lavatory you say, horrible freezing cold, super stinky moving torture room with impossible tap I say. The toilet was small and made of metal, when you flushed it the floor opened to the outside causing -30 degree gusts of air to flow into the room whilst sucking everything in the toilet onto the tracks, forming massive pee isicles under the train. The tap needed to be pushed and held upwards for the water to come out, this for some people caused bruising to the palm of the hand and made washing impossible. Luckily Mama Babs was in love with Julia and me so she let us use her luxury basin, as well as her fridge and electrical-wall-plug-socket, whilst she duped the other members of our group by giving them 25 packets of coffee each and making them a home cooked dinner, and then making them pay her afterwards....idiots.

Pee Icicles

Moving on to bane number three: Sleeping. The beds were not beds, they were planks from hell covered in faux leather. Some sympathetic soul had attempted to cover them with a slither of a mattress. This combination plus constant train jolting caused bruising on the hips, shoulders, ribs, elbows, neckdamage and everything else possibly imagined. I. Am. Not. Making. A. Joke. Despite this we slept for 14 hours a night because there wasn't anything else to do! It didn't help that we passed through seven time zones in four days, one day we woke up when the sun was setting....that was weird.

Waking up to sunset