Stepping on the train from Frankfurt, the day trip had already gone bad, the train was delayed so we missed our connection. Not to worry, there are always other trains and we didn’t have firm plans in Cologne at any rate.

The first stop was Frankfurt Airport, or flughaven in local speak. I can’t speak German, but I am able to throw together a mostly incoherent sentence to get what I need. My friends call this Jeff German and no doubt causes a sense of amusement to hear my heavily accented, grammatically incorrect and poorly executed attempt at conversation.

So when the train conductor requested my assistance to speak to a Chinese gentleman in English as German was of no help, I was happy to intervene. The only problem was, he didn’t speak English either so we faced a dilemma. We had time, he on the other hand faced a large degree of time pressure, he had to make his flight. Sure, that meant we would miss our train, but German trains are frequent and you just catch the next available train.

We took him to the platform he needed to be on but he looked lost. There was only one option, we jumped on a train going in the direction we just came from and took him to the airport. We all got off the train together, pointed him in the right direction, boarded our train to Cologne and were on our way.