80 Days in America

Waiting, trying to fall asleep, changing your position 100 times till you find some kind of a relaxed pose, listening music, reading a book, doing some work on the computer, watching a movie, looking outside, getting of the train some times at stops to get some fresh air and more sitting and watching outside till you reach your destination.

I think that’ll be a quite good summary of the journey of today. I was surprised by the large space you have in these trains, even for a tall guy like me. But still it’s kinda hard to fall asleep on those chairs. I think I’ll buy myself a pillow in New Orleans this weekend to make the trip of next week more comfortable. The people in the train were friendly and the food was quite affordable. During this ride the most I saw were trees and sometimes small villages. A few times we made a stop, waited for about 15 minutes and then continued in the direction of New Orleans.

This definitely is my longest ride with the train so far and next week will be twice as long. I did some work on the train, but I found out again that a big part of my work is also research, so I missed the internet sometimes. It’s nice that there is electricity and there are tables where you can work with your laptop. So far I’m positively surprised by the trains here, but I think that when I arrive in LA, I won’t travel by train for a while. Despite how comfortable it is, 20 hours is a long time. I’m not sure what’s the best way to say this in English, but on rides like this I walk against myself (that’s how we would say it in Dutch). What I mean is that I notice how bad I am in just sitting still and doing nothing. There are people that are really good in that, but I just always feel the urge to do something. Of course that has benefits like being productive and active, but I think it’s also important to be able to do nothing. Although I think I should become better in that, I stick with my decision of yesterday to enjoy the journey as much as possible so I won’t force myself to do nothing right now. Fortunately I got enough to do as I mentioned in the first paragraph 😉

In the evening I arrived in New Orleans. The last 20 minutes of the train ride was really beautiful. The train crossed a huge lake over a very small bridge. So both left and right the only thing you saw was water and some other bridges for cars. Since it was almost sunset, that was really a beautiful view. When I arrived I had to turn back my watch with an hour, because New Orleans is in a different time zone. Although the sun was already down, it was still very hot here. A friend of a friend of mine, Lydia picked me up from the station and told me that it won’t get colder here all night long. After we dropped the luggage at her place, we had diner somewhere and she showed me a lot of the city with her car.

New Orleans is really different than everything I’ve seen so far. The houses, the people, the atmosphere: completely different. There were a lot of people on the streets and there was music everywhere. First we went to some jazz cafe’s. I really enjoyed that, the music was so good! Later we went to the famous bourbon street, but that was really something I could have skipped. It’s just Amsterdam with danceplaces, hookers, drugs and alcohol everywhere. Interesting to see for one time, but no need to go back to. Already at the first night I saw that this city has two sides. On one hand there are ridiculous big houses, on the other hand you have many small poor houses. On one hand you have the nice jazz cafe’s, on the other hand the bad places like in bourbon street. Anyway, it’s a city very different then what I’ve seen so far here in America. Despite the fact that in some ways it really made me think of Amsterdam, New Orleans certainly is one of a kind. I decided to leave my camera home at the first night, but I hope to make some pictures tomorrow to show you this interesting city.