Topic: A Memorable Meal

Author: Chris Dunn

It was a ham sandwich. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but they say hunger is the best spice. I whole-heartedly agree, and would add to that adage, the sauce of serendipity.

We’d been on the train for hours, Euro-railing through the old country with my travel companions Kit and Drew. We were about half-way through our 30 day excursion and in the process of putting Spain and all its amazing sights behind us. We’d had a great time, visiting friends, wandering drunkenly through the Ramblas, visiting the wine country near Seville, eating paella on the beach in Valencia. It was a truly wonderful trip, but we still had so much Europe left to see. So it was with restless hearts, we set our sights on Italy and boarded the next available train out of Barcelona.

The upside of having a Eurorail pass is you can board any train to anywhere, the downside, you aren’t promised a seat. As a result we spent the trip sitting on the floor at the back of the train talking with a manic Irishman who claimed to be Macaulay Culkin’s cousin. He was so fuckin’ happy to see us. Said it was just so nice to finally have a chance to speak fuckin’ English. It was his favorite adjective. Everything was fuckin’ amazing and fuckin’ fast or fuckin’ stupid. The word had no sexual denotation whatsoever. He used it as an intensifier, like ‘very’. Later we would dub him, Fuckin’ Fenton, but at the time we happily shared our floor space next to the bathroom and the back door of the train. We passed the hours exchanging our Spain stories with him and informing drunken train wanderers that they had reached the ultimate back of the train. “No mas!” We would insist, but most still had to go look out the window to prove it to themselves.

It was about 3 hours in that we realized our dilemma. We were very hungry, and had no cash. In fact, we had very diligently made a point of spending every last peseta we had, so we could to avoid the exchange fees. This was long before the Euro and every country insisted on their own currency. The scant few coins we could scrape together barely constituted a dollar. In going through our bags and pockets - flipping passed traveler’s checks which wouldn’t be useful until we could hit a bank or a currency exchange – I found a single 20 franc note, worth about $4 at the current exchange rate. It wouldn’t get us much, but anything looks good if you get hungry enough. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t do us any good for at least another 4 hours when the train passed over into French territory. We filed the 20 francs away as a last chance contingency and continued to scrounge for coins in our giant backpacks.

Five hours later, bleary-eyed and very hungry, we hopped off the train in Perpignan, desperate to find something to buy with our precious franc note. From a tiny stand, we managed to purchase a pair of ham sandwiches and couple warm cokes. Not bad for four bucks! The sandwiches were exceedingly basic: a single slice of ham on a buttered French roll, but the roll was fresh baked and the butter was so sweet and salty. The ham was practically an afterthought giving just enough substance to make it a meal. They tasted so good, we were torn between wolfing them down greedily and savoring every morsel, especially since there would be nothing else until we reached Marseilles in another six hours.

Our hunger appeased, though not sated, we boarded the train and tried to sleep now that we had some food in our bellies. But when sleep didn’t come, we passed the hours rocking to the rhythm of the rail and sharing our impressions of how fuckin’ awesome those sandwiches were!