A little more than one month ago I had a job interview in Eindhoven. The interview went well (although it didn't lead to a job offer) and when I got back to the train station I learnt that due to a train accident there were no trains going on the route between Eindhoven and my home town Houten, so I was looking for an alternative route. After looking at the map one more time I realized that I could also take the "touristic" route. For the Dutch readers (or the foreigners that love to use Google Maps): I would go from Eindhoven further south to Venlo, then to Nijmegen and finally I would travel back to my hometown Houten via Utrecht Central Station. I had no idea how long this was going to take, but it couldn't be more than the 3 hours I would have to wait at the train station if I didn't do it, so I hopped on the intercity to Venlo.
You should know that people in the southern part of the Netherlands are very social people who really like to talk. This led to an interesting situation. I was sitting in this train when a man sat down opposite to me. This is not special and I was reading a book, so I didn't pay too much attention to him. Out of the blue the man said to me (in Dutch): "Hi, how are you?"
Though this is uncommon in my country, I just replied in a friendly manner and asked him how he was doing. He was doing fine. Great. Now I could read more in my book.
Or not. The man had been silent for about a minute and then he started talking (more or less to himself) about how there was yet another disruption of the train traffic and how it could be that the Dutch Railways could not prevent such disruptions. I felt it wouldn't be very nice if I just kept on reading, so I put my book down and started nodding towards the man that was sitting opposite to me and took a better look at him. His hair was messy: he was getting bald but he seemed to think that as long as he would let his hair grow longer it would go unnoticed. Furthermore the man had dirty clothes and long fingernails. It was clear to me that this man was living alone. When he started talking about his canary and how much work it was to clean up the cage of this bird ("because it's always escaping from the cage! You know how difficult it is to catch a loose canary?!?"), I knew for sure.
I tried to ignore the weird things this man said to me and have a normal conversation with him, as this was clearly what he wanted. We talked about the beauty of the southern part of the Netherlands, getting stuck with your bicycle while cycling through the forest and the economic crisis. The highlight of the conversation was when the man told me he had to live from unemployment benefits and how proud he was that he came up with an idea to save money: not switching on any lights at night.
"It's really not a problem for me to pee in the dark," he said.
The man got off the train in his home town Deurne and I looked around in the train compartment. It could have been my imagination, but it seemed like the people were relieved that this man and his dirty stories were gone.
I didn't feel relief though. In fact I felt a bit sorry for this man. As I started reading in my book again I thought about how this man was probably living a very lonely life, with his canary and his house without lights.
