Kira Rambles

“This train is delayed by 108 minutes. We encourage passengers to use the bar service.” 

Informative. Unapologetic. Concise. Favorite train announcement ever. 

I almost couldn’t believe I heard it. I almost couldn’t believe I was there. I received a fellowship through my university last Spring that included a trip to France, Germany, and Czech Republic and a Eurail pass for the month of May. Two years before, I had worked on the Spanish sail training ship Atyla, where a weird number of my shipmates were Polish, so I built in a few extra days on the front end of the fellowship to visit them and figured I’d milk my pass for all it was worth and see Eastern Germany from a train window. I was traveling from Berlin to Warsaw, kicking myself for letting my two years of high school German atrophy. 

And, at that moment, I may have been hallucinating. The humid Spring heat had saunaed the train compartment to fever-dream-like conditions, and you could see every tattoo on my body through my sweat washed button up and slacks, much to the chagrin of the Polish grandma sitting across the compartment whose feet staggered between mine and whose eyes kept landing on the nautical star on my sternum. I should have worn a bra. 

The windows didn’t open. The air conditioning tried. It failed.

The train arrived late to the station in Berlin, and, just before the Polish border in Frankfurt (Oder, not Am Main), we waited for almost an hour. In Germany, as future train journeys throughout the fellowship confirmed, they offer every train announcement once, in German. But once the Polish crew boarded, every overhead speaker spoke two languages: Polish and English. That’s when, my brain cooking, I heard it. 

“This train is delayed by 108 minutes. We encourage passengers to use the bar service.” 

I laughed. The Polish grandma sighed. I shuffled my feet to give her more room, and I wrote in my journal that I want to not say sorry like Polish trains. 

After every stop, even as the delay lengthened, the message stayed consistent: “This train is delayed. We encourage passengers to use the bar service.” My Polish is pitiful, but none of the parallel English announcements ever said anything about regretting the delay. Just, it is what it is. If you’re bored, walk to the bar.

When I arrived in Warsaw, my friends, smiling, rolled their eyes and said they warned me about Polish trains, but I loved the frankness of the announcement–and the fatalism. I loved how it communicated information and offered a suggestion to improve the situation, all without apologizing. Maybe it’s being a female-presenting person in a world that wants me to apologize for everything, but I loved how the announcement stood fast against the North American or German cultural expectation to apologize for lateness. I love how it refused to say sorry because I want to learn how to do that. 

I literally took notes.