POLIZEI!

November 12th--At least I had a good book to read.

The train ride from Amsterdam to Hamburg started at 11:00 and finished at 5:30. Also, there was an unexpected change required by work on the tracks, so it was lucky that they said everything in English at least once. I had picked up the second and third books of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, so I was able to make most of it go by pretty quickly.

The trip was unremarkable except for one awesome awesome moment. There was a 15 minute stop for a locomotive change, and I got out to stretch my legs. When I got back on, however, there were three guys in green uniforms with "POLIZEI" written across the back in big block letters. They were asking for our papers.

Now, if you don't immediately understand my glee at this, let me explain. In what seems like every WWII era movie ever made, some guy gets on a plane or a train or stops people at a roadblock and asks for "Papers" in a ludicrously thick German accent. I could only hope they wouldn't discover the codes I was carrying for the Resistance.

These guys were a far cry from the Polizei of Hollywood stereotype, calling in the numbers on an Italian guy's license on a cellphone, but it was still pretty funny/cool, especially since I haven't seen anything like that in Europe so far. Times have changed, though, because he saw that I had an American passport and didn't even make me open it. In fact, they only checked half the car of the train.

After that moderate excitment, I arrived in Hamburg and made my way to my cousin Karim's house in the suburbs. There I found a huge bed and a delicious home-cooked meal and all was good in the world.

And my papers were still passing with the Polizei, which meant I still had a chance to recover the amulet before the Nazis did.