I'm sitting here at my friend Sandra and Luciano's house in Demon Holland.

It's just outside of Amsterdam, and I'm in the middle of a two-week tour of Europe. It started out pretty great.

My taxi driver in Amsterdam said that he just recently immigrated from Iran and I said,

man, there just has to be a lot of new things that you're just discovering about the world.

And he said that he'd fallen in love with the music of chet atkins his guitar playing

and said that he just loves sitting back and listening to it and i thought that was beautiful and

timely i couldn't help but think of how wonderful music is and how it bridges so many gaps and cultures

i took a train from amsterdam to my first gig in Middleburg and I was the only

person sitting on my train car and they kept making these announcements every now and then in Dutch

but I don't speak Dutch so I didn't really pay much attention to it and we pulled into Rosalind

Station and they made an announcement over the Intercom and

Dutch and after just a little bit we pulled out of the station really slow and after about

30 seconds or a minute we stopped and I sat there for a while and we stayed stopped

and I started getting suspicious and I wondered what was going on so I got out of my seat

I walked all the way from one end of the train to the other and I was the only person on the train

I quickly realized that the announcement was saying that they were going to ditch the back five cars of the train when they got to the station and everybody should get out.

So I was stranded in this train cars that were pulled over into a parking area, just where they set excess cars.

And I tried to get out, the doors wouldn't open, I pulled the emergency lever seeing if I could get anybody's attention.

But since the train was powered down, it didn't do anything at all.

And I was looking just for writing, you know, there's little notices pinned up in different places,

and I was just looking for a phone number to call.

And I found a number that said SOS next to it so I called and it was the

...