You would think that after all these years I would finally get used to the fact that here in Europe they use the twenty-four hour clock as the default time format.

That means that eleven-thirty in the evening is represented as twenty-three-thirty so you can pretty much forget about all that PM and AM stuff altogether.

Look up in the TV-guide what programs are showing after dinner at eight-thirty, I mean eight-plus-twelve-plus-thirty-minutes is twenty-thirty. Confused? I (still) am.

So this might seem like a slight inconvenience, at least until it goes terribly wrong. Here's an interesting and entertaining example of such an oversite, though at the time I did not find it very amusing at all.

While in Amsterdam one evening late last week, I knew that the last direct train back home left at eleven-thirty, at least that is what I had carefully looked up the day before on the NS Treinplanner website.

Little did I realize while standing there in the dark on the platform waiting for a train which never came, that I had inadvertently looked up eleven-thirty European time which can only mean eleven-thirty in the morning.

I should have been more careful and looked up the correct time of twenty-three-thirty, e.g. twelve-plus-eight-plus-thirty-minutes.

Fortunately, upon closer inspection of the yellow list of times posted over there behind glass, there was a train traveling south via Utrecht. There I could change trains to nab the last stoptrein to Gouda.

Next time I will have to be more careful.