you're gonna want to read this story.

First off, just know that I drink a lot of water.  My friends here often make fun of the amount of water I consume at the dinner table. Come to think of it, when my best friend Kaitlyn was a waitress, she would automatically set a pitcher of ice water next to my plate to prevent the inevitable running back and forth from my table to the kitchen for water refills. So it should come as no surprise that I drank 2 full bottles of water on my train ride home from Poland this weekend.  Naturally, I quickly needed to use the bathroom.  Like, prettttty urgently. As the German rail is almost always the cleanest and most efficient of European rail systems, finding a bathroom on their trains is never an issue….that is, until this particular night.

For some reason, there was only 1 bathroom on my train and it was out of order. When I discovered this, I thought, “What a peculiar way to die….well, it’s been a good 23 years on Earth.” and then returned to my seat, bounced up and down, tried to read, tried to listen to music, tried to go to sleep (the worst of ideas) and resorted to taking photos of myself in the window in attempt to distract myself – all to no avail. I then decided to pray that somehow, God would make a toilet appear in front of me. When that didn’t happen, I had the following conversation with myself:

"Okay, I’m just going to have to get off the train at the next stop. There is no way, NO way, that I can wait 3 hours until I get to Nuremberg. There is just absolutely no way. And when I step off the train in the next town, it’s very likely – 99.9% likely, even – that the train will leave me before I have time to go to the bathroom and then re-board, which means it is also very likely that I won’t be able to make it home tonight, as this might be the last train of the night. So – I’m going to have to pay for a hotel room in whatever town I end up in and I’m going to have to call in tomorrow morning and inform them that I won’t be back in time to go to work…because I really had to pee."

Well, turns out, God didn’t make a toilet appear in front of me but something equally as miraculous happened. When the ticket-taker walked by me, I all but violently grabbed and shook him and in my most convincing please-have-pity-on-me-because-I’m-just-a-little-American-girl-all-alone-in-Germany-but-I’m-speaking-your-language-and-you-should-really-respect-me-for-that-because-so-many-Americans-ask-you-these-same-kinds-of-questions-but-in-English-and-isn’t-my-German-cute? voice, asked him if there was some kind of secret bathroom on the train I didn’t know about because I really, really, really had to use it. Please imagine how much I wanted to hug this man while simultaneously running through the train car screaming, “Praise God! Jesus lives!” when he told me that he had just received word that we had to make an unexpected stop in the next town, which would require us to de-board this train and board another train- a new train (also Nuremberg bound, of course), which would have a working bathroom.

Best day of my life. (Or so it seemed at the time.) Although that first hour of agony is something I’d never like to experience again.

But hey, at least I have these awesome self-portraits as a result, right?