I had decided to go home.

After 6 weeks of travelling around Europe with my parents, I'd seen one too many churches and nearly-dead Italian relatives, and decided I wanted to go home. I had a girlfriend waiting for me back in Perth, and my band were to play one of the biggest gigs of our careers (to that point) and was basically tired of it all. Europe is a wonderful place to young people with time and money, but to 'do Europe' with your parents, when you're a 17 year old, is not the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

So I arranged to go home.

This was less simple than it at first seemed.
Originally I was supposed to be leaving from Brussels, and though the time of my departure could be rebooked, the departure point could not. We were not in Brussels, we were in Turin. For those of you not familiar with the geography, it goes Turin, Turkey, Luxembourg, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Guam, Paraguay, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and then finally, Brussels. or more accurately, my route took me to go through Switzerland and France to get to Brussels from Italy. As with most journeys in Europe, this was to be done by train. For people from Europe, this is no big deal, but to an Australian, a long trip is done in a plane or a car. Anything else is a luxury/novelty.

So I climbed into the train in Turin at 9pm. I read my book for 50 minutes, and alighted in Milan. So far so good, I figure.

In Milan I hopped the train to Brussels. This is an overnight train. Sleeping in trains was something I learned in Japan, but the seats were uncomfortable, and I was terrified about missing my stop the next morning, getting my stuff stolen, or even being killed. My mother (the most paranoid human being on this god's earth) had filled my head with stories of murder and mayhem on Europe's intercity train system. I slept fitfully, in between reading a chapter or two from my battered copy of 'Lord of the Rings'. Eventually once it started to become light again, we stopped at a station. I knew it wasn't Brussels, because there were several more hours to go before we were due to arrive, and there was a sign outside with a French sounding name.

I stick my head out the window the the carriage to have a look around, only to hear a shout and see about 5 people in uniforms with BIG GUNS running towards me. My first assumption was that this was a hallucination from lack of sleep. I've experienced these before, but not after a single night of sleep deprivation.

Scant seconds later, the door to the carriage is thrown open, the uniformed people (3 men and two women, blue uniforms, little peaked 'yoplait guy' hats) bear down on me, aiming these large, high powered automatic weapons at me. Some people (I'm told) are used to seeing guns all the time, as part of their everyday lives, but as an urban Australian, the only times I see real guns close up are when I'm standing behind a cop at Subway...

One of the women yammers at me in French. I give her my best 'I do not speak French' look, and get a gun waved at close range in my face. If this was meant to teach me French in a big hurry, it didn't work. I DID nearly wet myself though. Whether this made me more or less capable international relations I'll leave up to you. She made herself understood that she wanted to see my papers, so I showed her my ticket and passport. She seemed satisfied, especially once she had determined that I was neither American nor English. She then asked to search my bags in the best game of charades I have ever played. I unlocked my suitcase and backpack, and stepped back to let her do her thing. Keep in mind that while this is going on, the cabin is literally FULL of burly frenchmen with rifles, all glaring at me.

She goes through my things, comes across a box of Belgian chocolates (Leonidas, for my girlfriend) which she determined (in her all knowing wisdom) to need 'quarantining' in the backpacks of one of her associates. Never saw THEM again...

Then the really amazing thing. The thing that blew my mind more than anything else. Looking in my backpack she finds a small stack of brightly coloured chips of plastic. Guitar plectrums, for the uneducated... I always have them, even if I don't have a guitar with me. She asks me in the thickest of thick absurd comical caricatured French accents...

'Are they WEAPONS?'

I am not making this up.
Guitar picks.
Plectrums.
If they weren't so small you'd let your 2 year old play with them, and this lump of useless obnoxiousness asks me if they're weapons.

I reach for a plectrum, with the intention of resuming our earlier game of charades, but having a gun shoved in your head changes your mind about these things. I say the word for guitar as many times as possible while nearly crying, until the gun goes away. I still can't remember if it was her or one of the others, but before I worked it out, they'd pretty much disappeared. I was missing a box of chocolates, but besides that, I was unharmed.

It was hands down the most surreal experience of my life.

I finished the train ride, got to Brussels, got on the plane, went to Heathrow, Singapore, and then on to Perth. I landed, got off the plane, went home, and fell asleep.