Coming Face to Face with the Free-Willing Nature of Europe
It is sometimes shocking that sometimes, a single bus ride can leave a lasting impression that can hardly be ever changed. The situation is just long enough for certain views to be formed, but at the same time short enough for the views to be highly generalized stereotypes, most often confirming previously held second-hand impressions and stories. Yet, even as the traveler is typing away on his laptop on the hard ground of Brussels Central Train Station, at a savagely unmitigated 3-degrees-Celsius wind at 6:30am, somehow the impressions just stick in the mind more than anything else. For some reason, a quiet midnight journey on the cross-Channel ferry from Dover to Calais, tonight, was turned into a madly drunk 3-hour party by a horde of British and French high school students, nominally on some sort of school trip, but with no obvious parental or teacher supervision, seemed to be bent on spreading their notoriety far and wide on the Continent. From the second we the passengers got