Today in the morning we started our journey back to Wiesbaden. We went by train and already talked about how nice it is to have this convenient way of travelling. There are good connections, you can just get in, sit down and enjoy the ride until you are at your destination. You can sleep, read, work on computer and even on the internet on some trains and of course you can also have food in the train.

We had prepared some things to take along on the train so that we could have lunch. We unpacked our food shortly after crossing the border to Germany and placed it on the table which was in between us. There were four seats, two and two in front of each other with a table in between and we had reserved three of those places. We had seen before that a person has reserved the fourth place, too, from the first Germany station up to Frankfurt. Otherwise, the rest of the train was pretty empty.

So we started eating and when the train stopped, a woman came in, looked at the seat numbers and said to us ‘This is my seat’. Ramona replied that now we were eating, if she would not mind, she could sit just next to us across the aisle where the same combination of seats with table was completely empty. Ramona added that she would have more space there. You could see in the lady’s face that she absolutely disagreed. ‘This is going too far!’ she said to Ramona and then to me, in English, ‘I paid for this place!’ Ramona was still friendly and told her that it was absolutely no problem if she wanted to sit on her seat, just there would be more space on the other side. The woman insisted and sat down with us.

There she was, sitting at our table, looking as if something had made her really angry. I thought it would be just friendly to offer her some food, too, as we were having lunch, so I asked her ‘Would you like to have some food? We have plenty!’ She replied ‘Oh, I can see, there is plenty, no, thank you!’ We smiled at that but she did not move her mouth. She kept on sitting there for a while, watching us eating with an expression on the face that clearly displayed her thoughts. Why were we sitting here next to her? Why were we eating happily while she was so angry? Why did she have the bad luck to have the seat right next to us and how could we dare asking her to sit somewhere else? Then, after maybe fifteen minutes, she got up, took her bag and left. She did not sit across the aisle, where the seats were still empty. She moved to the next wagon.

It was a very funny incident. We had to laugh about it afterwards and Thomas said this was typically German. The woman paid for the seat with this number, so she had to have this number! Even there was another option and with much more space, but she absolutely wanted to sit there. We could understand her hesitation if the whole train had been full and she could not find any other place. We could also understand if she had reserved a place with table and there was no other table free but there was the same place arrangement with three more places free!

Well, this did not spoil our mood, for us it did not really matter if she was sitting with us or not, but we thought about her and her mood. She fully spoiled her own mood for her journey and for no reason at all! We talked about it and realized that some people just have this kind of negative attitude towards strangers, towards changes, towards any kind of unplanned activity. There is no reason to be upset but still they decide to be. Be happy and positive instead!

Switzerland was nice but we are also happy to be back here in Wiesbaden.