I was on a red-eye train from Rome to Munich. They vastly oversold the train. Not only were there no more seats available, but the hallway and ends of the cars (where the WCs are) were packed - standing room only.
We, of course, were right next to the WC door, so anyone who had any business to do had to go by me. At one point we think there were 5 women in that tiny closet. A young mother with an infant, and older woman who must have been her mother, and an even older woman who must have been her grandmother. And I don't know who all else. We joked about how many women it takes to change a diaper.
There was this German family with a mute teenage son heading home. There was an Italian lady with a 5-gallon jug of homemade wine. I was with a buddy who speaks English and German. The German family spoke German and Italian. The Italian lady spoke only Italian. And I speak only English. So, to communicate, my buddy spoke to the family in German, who then spoke to the lady in Italian. Then I heard about it in English.
That all got to be too much, so the lady opened her jug and started passing it around. Most of us took a polite sip, some of us a little more enthusiastically than others. But the lady spent the next several hours getting sloshed. A few hours into it, she was pinching my cheeks and shouting "¡Bellisimo!" and singing to me in sloshed Italian.
It was extremely cold. At some dark hour of the night, a young beautiful woman came back and we got to talking. She loaned me her jacket for the rest of the trip. She needed it back when she got off the train at dawn. I think she might have been an angel.
One train ride, so many memories.