Choo Choo

Standing in the cold, waiting. Your luggage lies peacefully right next to you. Before you put your hands in your pockets you adjust your scarf, checking the round clock at the platform ceiling. Two more minutes. You move weight onto your left leg. There are people on the platform. Not many. Sun wakes up in the East and its beams spill all over the platform and the rails. Then you hear it. Somewhere in the distance morning silence is broken by quick coughing that becomes stronger and louder by every passing second. Weak vibration climbs up your body. Loud typical rumble takes over the morning. Finally.

I don't know how many of you actually do travel by train. For me, for example, it became an absolute necessity as I am obliged to travel to a bigger city where my college education takes place. When I stood up on a platform waiting for train to take me to my school for the first time, I felt little bit annoyed. Well, a lot annoyed actually. The idea of endless waiting, people crowding both on platforms and in trains, time wasted by travelling made my mood go down immediately. Not speaking of all the discount cards I had to obtain, travelling by train was just horror for me.

When I finally managed to fight my way through the crowds in the train, the journes itself was quite soothing to my dancing nerves. Comfortable seats in quite a spacey carriage had peculiar feeling. Sitting there, watching all the people travelling with me - mothers with their children, seniors with their walking sticks, businessmen with their suitcases... - made me realize I was experiencing something exceptional there. Of course, hundreds of thousands of people travel by train every day, but every single journes and every single carriage in this world of trains has its own climate and habitat. With that along there go unique passengers with their different purposes. And even though they differ from one another in countless of ways, at that very moment they are - even though maybe for a few minutes - all in one place, united.

Soon I came to a conclusion that being on train is one of the best thing in a week. It's those three quarters of an hour when I sit on train reading a book, listening to music in my headphones or simply staring dreamily out of the window, watching the passing countryside, that settle my nerves and make me feel... 

...yes, happy.