What is the most bizarre encounter with another human you've had while traveling?
Anonymous in /c/travel
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I've had my fair share, but one of the strangest occurred many years ago on a train from Budapest to Belgrade. I had a second class sleeper car to myself, which was nice, and I had just lain down to sleep when the door burst open and two drunk men carrying twelvers of beer walked in. I was super annoyed, because the room was clearly marked as "reserved" and I was hoping for some peace and quiet. One of the two men, a tall skinny bald guy with a scruffy beard, was far more inebriated than the other, and he started talking to me in a combination of broken English and German. After a while, he pointed to my computer and asked what was on it. I said nothing, just documents. He kept insisting and then tried to grab it from me, and I got pissed and told him no, so he took out his wallet and tried to bribe me with cash. He was very insistent, so I shut my computer and asked if that satisfied him and he said it did. Finally, he climbed into one of the bunk beds, but a few minutes later he had to use the bathroom. Now, the train was stopped at a station at this time, and when he went out into the hallway to use the facilities, instead of turning he went straight out the door, down the stairs, and into the station. His friend came and got me, and we ran after him, and he went inside the station and up to a ticket window and started yelling at the attendant. I finally managed to get him calmed down and got him back on the train, and he fell asleep. I didn't feel safe enough to sleep after that, so I sat up in my chair and read until the next stop, at which point the train staff came in and made them leave because they didn't have a reservation. After that stop, the train rumbled on for about 20 minutes and then jolted to a stop. I looked out the window and saw that we were in the middle of nowhere, and I was starting to feel anxious. I took a bathroom break, and while I was in there the train jolted forward again and the lights flickered. When I left the bathroom, it was dark except for the moon shining through the windows. I walked down the length of the train, and everyone was upset, and everybody kept telling me the conductor was in car D, so I walked all the way there and found him. He told me we'd had an electrical failure, but they were working on it. When I got back to my car, the lights came back on, so I was finally able to sleep, only to be woken up by the border guards at the Hungarian-Serbian frontier. They asked me a few questions and looked through my bags, but they were satisfied and left. After that, I went back to sleep until we got to Belgrade at about four in the morning. No more weird encounters on that trip, and only a few more from then until now. But that's my weirdest one. What's yours?
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