Train Ride, and Brits

On a sleeper train right now en route. I'm supposed to wake up at 3:15, so I really should be asleep, but ah, well. The experience was worth it.

We got on the train, me sitting with Denny. I switched with Brenna at Matt's insistence that she would get tired of Denny, always being near him. She was ambivalent, but Matt literally grabbed our tickets. Talked with Denny, a Canadian woman here with a tour group, mostly British, whose name I didn't catch, and a Thai student whose name I won't type for fear of butchering it too badly. I do remember it, just don't have a clue how to spell it. She was very helpful, telling us about etiquette on Thai trains and bags and things. About to graduate high school, she's interested in science and thought high school was harder in Thailand than in the US based on her friends. I'm not going to argue with her, it's probably true. She asked Denny who his best student was, and when he said they were all good, she asked who had the highest scores. Very indicative of the different philosophies of education, I think. Denny, of course, talked about us all having different strengths, I made a joke about me leaving the conversation and her asking again. (She also said she had poor English, but I thought it was some of the best I'd heard in Thailand.) Talked with them for a bit, also to Killian, one of the British guys here with the tour group. He was playing a card game called Shithead which I haven't ever seen before. I headed towards the back and met Will, Mike and Imogen (our Thai friend thought Will and Imogen were part of our group, which was how we got started talking – I brought her back to meet other kids from the trip). Mike was drinking a screwdriver that was about 2% orange juice, the rest vodka. Not very good vodka, either. Apparently the three of them had a series of Travel Scrabble games on this whole trip, and tonight was the big night of the last game. It was very fierce competition, obviously. As they got to their game, I let them be and talked to Sophie, Amy, Maddie and Leigh (“Lee”). The first two from Hampshire, the last two from Sussex. Imogen and Will were from Buckinghamshire (I think?), Mike I never asked. I ended up talking to those four girls for probably a couple hours, covering the whole range of topics: what we saw in Thailand (Elephants Helping Haiti sounded cool, elephants with baskets in their trunks for donations), education in our respective countries, alcohol, marijuana, Amsterdam (yes, related), the lack of trains in the US, differences in our accents and words we use (things like “lift” and fries, chips and crisps. Leigh had fun with this, being an English major, and they all enjoyed me saying “bottle” and then trying to say it the English way. Apparently, Sussex is the least accented in England, kind of like the Midwest in the US), and I don't even remember all what else. At one point a bug was crawling near me and they all freaked out, I of course picked it up and started examining it, assuring them all it couldn't be poisonous because it was brown. Then I explained warning coloration and why it was important and so on. Got to show off a bit of biology. Will and Imogen had joined the conversation by that point: Mike nearly won Scrabble, but Will used all his tiles first and won on the points deducted from Mike and Imogen and added to him. It was a very tense final round. All in all, a great way to spend an evening on a train, really cool people. Hopefully they'll be reading this whenever I get around to posting it and they find wireless. In fact, I'd still be talking to them if we hadn't all gotten tired and I felt like eh, I should get a LITTLE sleep.

Sunday, January 24th, roughly 11-11:10 PM local time