Journey to Namur

I had to go to Namur in Belgium on business. I was supposed to be there on a Saturday at 4.30, so instead of taking the plane on Friday evening and wasting a lot of Friday afternoon getting there I thought I’d leave very early on Saturday morning and arrive in Brussels at half past ten which will give me plenty of time to get to Namur by 4.30. So very early in the morning on Saturday the taxi arrived on time and I took the taxi to the local station. I was in plenty of time for the train. In fact I was early for the train and when I got to the station, a slow train to Reading where I was to catch the coach was waiting on the platform. I thought about taking the slow train but although it left before the fast train it arrived in Reading after the fast train. So I thought that I’d go and wait for the fast train which I did for a very long time, past the time it was supposed to arrive. About 10 minutes after the train was supposed to be in the station an announcement came over that there were floods in Woodenbasit which were delaying this train. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited. The train finally got there but because the train was late, I had missed my coach at Reading and had to wait another. In fact I missed two coaches and I had to wait for another 20 minutes or so before the next coach which should still have gotten me to the station, I mean to the airport just barely in time. Unfortunately there were roadworks on the motorway between Reading and Heathrow and the coach was delayed quite a bit. I hadn’t really worried up to now but I was starting to get worried now that I was gonna miss my plane. When I stepped out of the coach at Heathrow, it was 19 minutes to take off time. So I stepped out of the coach, fortunately I only had hand-baggage, I grabbed my bags and ran to the departure area. I put my bag through the X-ray machine and then found a short passport line and got into line and had my passport checked and ran to the gate. When I was almost at the departure gate, I realized that I had my hand baggage but I’d left my hand-bag back at the X-ray machine. So I turned around and ran back towards the X-ray machine, being screamed at on the way by a couple of security guards because you are not supposed to go back the same way that you come in. I did get my hand-bag. I ran back through passport control. Fortunately the man at passport control had recognized me, and got to the gate only to find out that the plane was late. So we waited and we waited and the plane finally took off. And we were almost an hour late getting to Brussels but I figured this would still probably be O.K. We did have to wait a while to land at Brussels, because we were late, because we weren’t scheduled to arrive then and we had to circle the airport for a few minutes. So we did land at Brussels and I hurried out and found the longest lines for passport control I had ever seen in my life. They just snaked all over the arrival area. It turned out that that weekend the Pope was in Brussels or in Belgium and the Passport officers were being very, very careful trying to keep the terrorists out of Brussels and so the passport control took ages and ages. I was really getting worried about this time but when I got out of the passport control, out into the main airport, our representative, our local representative was waiting for me and told me we were O.K. and we could make the train. We jumped into a taxi and rushed off to the train station and our local representative was wonderful. She’d realized that things were gonna like they were, that we wouldn’t have time to eat lunch. She had lunch, bought for me, she had everything, all arranged. We got to the train station and the train fortunately was on time. It was a real sigh of relief that we sat down in the train and I applied myself to the yoghurt and apple that she’d brought along as a snack. So we were on our way to Namur and I thought everything was O.K. Halfway to Namur an announcement came over the speaker system on the train that there was a bomb scare. The train stopped and we all had to get off the train and waited at the station indefinitely. So we got off the train and waited about 30 minutes before they found another train to take us on to Namur. And we finally got to Namur about 10 or 15 minutes before I was supposed to begin talking to these people. But I must say it was a really heroine experience.

(from The Cambridge English Course 3, by M.Swan, C.Walter. Unit 30. Less. A)

UNIT 2

Lesson B

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16