Paying attention is a MUST!

This isn't the promised email, but I really don't want to lose my readership, so I will share this story that is really quite embarrassing (I have your attention now, don't I?).

The other day Nicole, Katie, Elaine and I were all riding the train trying to get back to the Student City (if I slip one of these days and call it the Studentenstadt, just know that that is where we live). Normally when we take the train from the University to home, we take one called U6 Garching Hochbrueck, which is the name of the last stop on the line. We had gotten on at the University, or somewhere near there, and this particular train said U6 Muenchener Freiheit. As we got on Nicole made the comment that she thinks that means that the train only goes as far as Muenchener Freiheit (which is the name of one of the stops we normally pass through) because once before we were on a train where everybody got off and she thought that it had said the same thing that time. This seemed like a reasonable hypothesis. However, we all started talking and before I knew it I looked up to see some old man pointing at us as the doors to the train were closing. We looked up and realized that we were at Muenchener Freiheit; everyone had gotten off but us and we were too late: the doors were closing.

I would like to take this time to point out that the old man wasn't pointing with concern: he was, in fact, pointing and laughing. I would also like to make it clear that we weren't just supposed to intuitively know that we were to get off, the conductor had been announcing it for quite some time (the older trains don't have a recording, the guy actually has to announce each station and tell everyone to stand back each time) and we were just too engrossed in our conversation to pay attention. And I would, lastly, like to say that it wasn't that we didn't understand what was going on or what the word "aussteigen" means, we totally understood - we just weren't paying attention.

So the train is driving off, with us on it, and we have no idea where it's going. It pulls into a dark area and parks. We think that we are parked for the night (although, in retrospect, the "garage" that we thought we were in was awfully close to the Munchener Freiheit station). So we decide that the best course of action is to press the Emergency button. The man comes on and asks what our emergency is. We say that we are stuck on the train. He asks if there is a medical emergency and Elaine, who speaks the best German of all of us, steps up and explains that we were supposed to "aussteig" but didn't, and now we are stuck on the train. He says something to the effect of, "You know that the train goes back the other way in a minute or so?" So Elaine says something like, "Actually, we didn't know that. No problem, then, nevermind!" And so he says again, "So there is no medical emergency?" and we say, "No," and that was that. Sure enough, a few minutes later the conductor walks by to go to the other end of the train and we just about laugh ourselves silly. Now, everytime we go past Munchener Freiheit one of us will start laughing and say, "Remember the time we forgot to get off the train?" and the rest of us will start laughing too. At least we won't make that mistake again; but, if we do, we know not to push the emergency button because the train will just go back the other way in a minute or two!