Planes, Trains, and Travel Appeal

The train rolled into the station with a muted complaint of stressed steel. I awoke abruptly, piecing together where I was. I looked out the window at the passing blur of suburban Chicago. My limbs unfurled, knocking the rucksack sitting at my feet off the chair, contents cascading on the floor and over the railing below.
I looked down at the spilled belongings with the begrudging realization that abandonment was my best bet. Nothing below me was worth more than a buck, and most of it needed washing.
Internally, the constant refrain looped once more - “How did I end up here?”
Shaking my head and jostling my way to the train exit, I put abstract questions aside for concrete facts. I had a plane to catch. As I ran from the train station to the street, I remembered the last time I had been on a train, half a world away.

The palsied start and screeching stop of the train didn’t even cause me to turn in my sleep, which was good, considering that if I had I'd have started the day off with a ten-ft. drop onto the unforgiving floor.
The train was ancient, owing either to its effectiveness or China’s government’s unwillingness to invest in this region’s infrastructure.
My room, if you could call it that, was barely wide enough to fit my outstretched hands, and doing so would have resulted in both hands gaining a level of intimacy with two of the six (if you were lucky) sleeping Chinese in the compartment.
“Not that they would mind, personal space is a non-issue in this country,” I thought.
To accentuate that point, a gnarled hand reached over the inert forms below me and shook me awake, ignoring my incoherent mumbles of complaint. As I rose and looked over the edge at my assailant, the smell of dried tofu, cucumbers, duck legs, and myriad other foods that only a train in China can provide reached my nose, followed by the unrelenting smell of cigarette smoke that blankets this country like a perfume.
“Can I help you?” I asked in mangled Chinese.
“How did you end up here?” replied the face squinting at me from below.

I made it to the airport with minutes to spare, cutting my reminiscing short. Hearing “Last call for Bangkok", I thrust my passport and ticket at the stewardess and sprinted past. Once aboard, I permitted myself a sigh of relief. The passenger next to me jostled my elbow and asked what anyone else would have considered a simple question - “Where are you going?”
I paused, the cogs in my mind turning as I sought a response.
My reply, “Everywhere.”