Hamburg - Part III: Coming back

These pictures are unrelated to what I'm writing about. They are of Hamburg. Anyhow, we got on the train to go back to Berlin. The train was really crowded and we had to walk through the whole train to find seats near each other. I mean, the whole train. At some point, a guy wanted to tag along with us since we had a weekend ticket. Weekend tickets are 33 Euros and allows you to travel on all local trains for one day and can be used for up to 5 people. But we think we thought we were crazy to keep walking around so he gave up on us.

The seats that we found were pretty nice. Carolyn and I got "tables" next to us, which was nice since we were trying to eat our burger. Carolyn and I talked about the most random stuff ever and were having lots of fun. The lady in front of us, however, was not. She was sitting near a guy who had his music on really loud (I'm going to call him the "music guy".) She asked him to turn it down and not only did he refused, he mumbled bad stuff at her for like 10 minutes. She asked him again and they got into a heated argument. The guy sitting behind us started yelling at the music guy too. I'm not sure what's with guys and arguments but those two started fighting. The music guy butted his head against the top of the other guy's nose. It didn't sound too good. They separate and the other rummaged through his stuff and took out a perfume bottle. I was afraid he would take out a knife or something sharp. But he hit the music guy and the music guy started bleeding. I don't think either of them were injured badly but yeah. All of them either got off the next station or left our car, which was good.

After this we changed to another train on which we rode for only 10 minutes. Then as we were changing to our final train, Carolyn noticed a guy wearing an MIT 2009 sweatshirt. We were debating whether or not to say hi to him. He was waiting for the same train as well and we chatted near him until Jingwen and Carolyn finally made me ask him whether or not he's from MIT. Turns out he goes to Princeton but his brother goes to MIT. He's also Class of '09. So we ended up chatting with him the whole way back to Berlin, which was another 2 hour long train ride. We had a really interesting conversation.

He grew up in Germany but was born in the US. He's studying psychology at Princeton and is working for the Parliament this summer. Which is really cool since Carolyn was born in Germany but grew up in the US. His English is really good, by the way. Anyhow, we swapped stories about college life and other things. At one point, Jingwen mentioned that she really likes the British accent and he said he might pick one up when he goes to England for an exchange program next year. Turns out, he's going to Oxford. Too bad he's not going to Cambridge but man, what a coincidence! At some point, he asked about Carolyn's Brass Rat. So she told him all about the details of the ring. This took a while and a guy who was sitting in front of us poked around and was really interested as well. He is serving his time in the army but wants to get a degree at a university. He's thinking about going to the US and asked us about financial aid and admissions. He had done an exchange program and lived in the US for a while in high school. Seems like a pretty smart guy. His English is definitely good enough. He got off the train before we did to go to his army base. The four of us kept talking about random stuff and decided to go museum hopping together on Thursday. That was one amazing train ride.