An Exercise in Frustration

Wow.  Well, I HAD faith in the German rail system, Deutsche Bahn, but on the beginning of my epic EuroTour I've only needed to catch three trains so far, and they've ALL been late and made me miss connections.  Let's hope this isn't a pattern for the week, as much as I like train travel… but that all comes later.  Let's start from where we left off.

Which, ironically, also begins with a missed train.  I got up bright and early on Sunday morning, the 17th of June, ready to knock another Dutch city off my list before heading back for another busy week of classes and outings.  Checking out of the hostel was an ordeal in itself - I was so desperately low on Euros that the 10-Euro key deposit meant the difference between eating and going hungry that day.  Unfortunately, my travel partner Nick wasn't quite as… motivated… as I was to get an early start.  Since he didn't want to give up his room key before leaving, and the front desk wouldn't give me the deposit without both room keys, I took Nick's last 10 Euros (he wasn't exactly rolling in money either, remember) and told him to collect the deposit.  Fortunately breakfast was available by the time I had to leave, so I was able to get at least one meal in.  I slathered Nutella and apple butter on toast, added a generous helping of sprinkles, and poured myself a bowl of Musli (a trail-mix snack somewhere between granola and oats) on the side.  Since we had wi-fi in the hostel, I figured I might as well check what track my train left from instead of having to navigate the construction site of the Rotterdam Central station, figuring that I wouldn't have very much extra time once I got there (I never leave myself enough time to get anywhere when I'm traveling, and sometimes it comes back to bite me, as you may remember from previous adventures).  But when I found the site and typed in my train number (which I had, at least, previously investigated - go me ;]), I got a message which read "this train has been cancelled. Seek another connection."  Under what kind of circumstances is a train CANCELLED?  I have no idea, but apparently I do NOT have good luck with Dutch trains.  (That's my second stop on this EuroTour - let's hope my fortune has improved in the meantime!) However, my (unprecedented) foresight of checking at the hostel allowed me to easily find the track and time of the next train headed to Den Haag, and actually gave me more time to enjoy my breakfast before dashing across town to the station (my Rotterdam Welcome Card was only good for two days, and I'm too cheap to pay for public transportation across short distances if I can avoid it).  It was quite a charming walk, actually, up one of the main streets of the city which runs parallel to a canal, and quite peaceful on a Sunday morning.  The construction labyrinth around the Centraal station had been completely reorganized overnight (it's like they don't actually WANT you to travel anywhere :P), but eventually I found my way inside and settled down for a comfortable ride to Den Haag.  It didn't take long to reach - only about 30 minutes - and soon I was wandering the train station, looking for a map to orient myself.  The only one I could find was posted on a construction fence (surprise, surprise, this station was also under construction) and showed little more than the city center.  Of course, my foresight had not extended to looking up a map of Den Haag beforehand, or planning out a route to hit up the sights I had picked out.  With difficulty, I found the probable location of the museums listed on my "to-see" list, snapped a picture with my iPod which soon proved too low-quality to be of any real use, and set off in the general direction of my first stop.

A fawn and rabbit share breakfast in the city park

Just across the square from the central station was a pond in which a flock of Canadian geese, together with their half-grown young, swam.  As I passed by, they flocked hopefully to the edge of the water, looking for handouts.  I pulled my extra sandwich out of my bag (at this point it was three days old and not very appetizing) and tore the crust off, bit by bit, to feed them, trying to be inconspicuous in case feeding the birds was frowned upon.  Shoving the still-soft center of the sandwich back in my bag for later, I moved on and was soon soon strolling through a lovely park on a wide, tree-lined gravel path.  Looking to my right I noticed a fence, and beyond it, a herd of deer grazing peacefully.  I did a double-take - yes, there was a big herd of spotted deer in an enclosure right in the middle of the city!  Those crazy Dutch… anyway, it being June, some of the fawns looked like they couldn't have been more than a month old, and watching them caper and play brought a smile to my face (I even got a video of a couple of little ones mock-sparring).  However, I soon turned a corner and left the deer behind.  Across the field was a strange little shack with a rainbow-striped flag flying from it - as I got closer, I could make out the words "Occupy Den Haag" scrawled across the side.  Two or three tents were tucked into the woods behind the shack - not a very impressive showing; I guess the Europeans don't feel very strongly about "being the 1%".  I haven't seen any signs of the "Occupy" movement anywhere else in Europe, though.

"Occupy Den Haag". It looked to be about 8 strong.

It was a lovely stroll through more parks and nature preserves out to the Louwman auto museum, though it took a good hour to get there.  I actually had no intention of visiting the museum itself (the entrance fee was 13.50 Euros with no discounts for students, and cars aren't a particular interest of mine), but in Rotterdam I had picked up a coupon for a free postcard which I thought would make a nice souvenir for my little brother (he's not REALLY into cars anymore, but he's a 15-year-old boy and I have no clue what else to get him).  Unfortunately, with my usual oversight (do we see a theme here?  You think I would learn at some point) I had impetuously decided to make the 1-hour walk without reading the fine print on the card, which clearly stated "1 free postcard WITH ADMISSION TICKET".  I should have known - there's no such thing as free lunch.  Slightly dispirited, I looked around the gift shop to see if anything else caught my eye to justify my trek out here, but nothing looked worthy of my last few Euros, so I moved on.  Since I couldn't properly read the road names on the iPod photo of the city map, I headed off in the direction which seemed most likely to be the right one, trusting to my usually-reliable sense of direction.  Unfortunately, when you're as far north as the Netherlands, the sun doesn't help much with direction, because it's basically just in the south of the sky the entire day.  I passed by a stable and saw a few people out exercising their horses, and even followed one sprightly young gelding for a bit before I overtook him and his walker.  The advantage of being on foot is that no path is off-limits, no matter how sketchy.  I walked on a sand hiking trail for a while and skirted some dunes that looked like they belonged in Florida than the Netherlands.  I hit upon a relatively well-marked bike path and re-entered a residential area, wishing the whole time for my trusty bike so that it didn't take so darned LONG to get places.  Sure enough, I took the wrong way once or twice and had to resort to following bus routes in order to orient myself (each bus station has a map of the neighborhood). Finally at 1:30 I arrived at what should have been my next destination - only to find that I hadn't cross-checked the address from TripAdvisor and I wasn't at the right museum at all.  I wanted to be at a dungeon museum and instead I was staring at a giant modern art sculpture.  It turns out I had a coupon for a free postcard here, as well, but at this point I was tired, hungry, and my feet were sore, and though the coupon didn't explicitly say "with admission ticket," the lines at the ticket desk were long enough to convince me that it wasn't worth trying.  The one high point of this frustrating detour was that the museum had free Wi-fi.  I immediately Googled the ACTUAL address of the dungeon museum, called up Google Maps and got directions.  While giving my poor feet a well-deserved break, I memorized the directions and closely examined the map of the city, noting with relief that the museum was actually within a couple blocks of the main station where my train was scheduled to leave from at 5:15pm.  I wearily set off again, but I didn't get far before my hunger and frustration overwhelmed my desire to accomplish everything on my list.  Finding a bench with a pretty view, I broke out my trail mix (which I had brought from Princeton) and took the edge off my hunger.  In less than two minutes I was surrounded by a flock of small, crow-like black birds who eyed me hungrily and crept ever closer.  Feeling like a character in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", I picked out the smallest, blandest pieces of my trail mix and tossed them to the flock, testing how close they would come to me to get the food (some of them definitely got within two feet).  When I tired of this, or rather, got creeped out by all of the birds staring at me with their beady black eyes, I moved on, though I had to walk nearly two blocks before the last of the birds stopped hopping along behind me, hoping for more treats.

After what seemed like an eternity of walking in the uncomfortable heat, I found the Museum de Gevangenspoor, or Prison Museum.  I couldn't have been more disappointed.  The ticket office was so hidden in a corner that I almost walked out again, thinking I was in the wrong place.  The entrance price was a whopping 7.50 Euros, which information I hadn't been able to find beforehand, and it turned out that the only way to see the museum was on a guided tour, which ended up being solely in Dutch.  They gave me a flimsy 8-page pamphlet that supposedly gave the same information as the tour, but from knowing German I could tell that I was missing things.  The room with the torture implements was not nearly as impressive as I had been led to believe and NOTHING was labeled, so the end result of my museum visit was that I was completely fed up and frustrated with my day.  I left a scathing review of the museum on the provided survey and kept the pamphlet in English out of spite, though they had suggested that I return it "when I was finished".  Objectively, the museum probably wasn't so terrible, but on top of everything else that had happened that day, it was like the straw that breaks the camel's back.  Dejected to the point of tears, I gathered my backpack from where I had stowed it in a locker (at least I hadn't had to carry the weight through the museum tour) and stumbled back out onto the city streets.  By this point it was nearly 4:30 and time to head back to the station to catch my train.  When I pulled my ticket out of my bag to check the track number and exact time, my heart nearly stopped.  In my haste to buy the ticket before I left, I had chosen a DIFFERENT station in Den Haag as my starting point.  Not knowing what else to do, and fortunately having left a little extra time to get to the station (which never happens), I hurried on to the station and looked for the train number.  Praying that the Netherlands were like Germany and I wouldn't meet a conductor until after I had passed my declared starting point, I climbed on to the train and settled down into a nervous wait.  When we passed the station without any sign of railroad personnel, I let out a sigh of relief and slumped over to take a nap, completely exhausted by the miles I had covered that day.  I was shaken awake from a lovely dream some time later by the conductor, who took one look at my ticket and moved on.  I managed to get back to Dortmund without further incident and literally fell into bed at 9:30pm, too tired even to take a shower as I hadn't since leaving Germany.  Before I drifted off completely, I vowed that I would never again travel alone to a country where I didn't speak the official language, even if practically everyone speaks English.

(For the record, I think I'm already technically breaking that vow by traveling to both Amsterdam and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium on my EuroTour.)