A Night at the Station: A Timeline

MUNICH, Germany—I never intended to spend the night at Munich’s main train station, a sprawling structure that flows into a neighborhood of food stands, youth hostels, sex shops, strip clubs, and casinos.

Rather, the intention was to be more spontaneous than usual—to get out of my comfort zone and go into Munich, without a meticulously detailed agenda in hand.

But on this star-crossed evening, every affordable option in Munich was booked, and shelling out exorbitant amounts of money didn’t factor into my romantic idea of spontaneity. So, I stiffened my lip, bought an espresso, and settled into the sleepless world of Hauptbahnhof München.

What follows is timetable of how I spent the next six hours:

11:30 - 11:40 p.m.—Store backpack in locker. Consider spending the night in a storage locker (only five euros!).

11:40 - 12:10 a.m.—Wander the Central Station vicinity. Pass by several strip clubs. Consider if I would ever consider getting a lap dance, if I were a guy who were the considering type. It begins to rain, heavily. Wander back into the Hauptbahnhof (Hbf).

12:10—Remember I was diagnosed earlier that evening with a very mild case of what the doctor told me was varicella.

12:20—Watch drunken German stag parties stumble into the station in lederhosen, singing. The station has interesting acoustics.

12:30—Spot a mesmerizing exhibition by World Press Photo of 2011’s award-winning photos. See pictures of a bull impaling a matador through the throat, earthquake victims in China and Haiti, oil spills all over the world, gang violence on a street corner in Brazil, the corpse of a young girl being tossed into a mass morgue, an old woman falling on a sidewalk, volcano eruption in Indonesia, and carcasses of cows signaling impending famine.

1:00—Chilled by the photo exhibition. Reminded of own mortality. Grapple with mortality.

1:50—Wander around the mostly closed shops in the Hbf. See advertisement for prepackaged iced coffee. Walk into store to buy iced coffee; drink. Feel disappointed.

2:20—Reminded that I have the chicken pox, or at least am supposed to be sick. Suddenly feel hungry and slightly cold.

3:00—Get instant chicken noodle soup from vending machine for half a Euro. The carrot pieces are orange, chewy, and fragrant.

3:15—Buy another cup of instant soup. Vegetable soup. Hot, and delicious.

4:30—Pick up backpack from storage locker. Sit on bench next to track.

5:35—Train arrives.

5:36 a.m.—Board train. Try to understand own mortality and inconsistency of the world. Think about having chicken pox and try to fall sleep.

Christine S. An ’12, an arts writer, is a Literature concentrator in Cabot House.