the train travel

I went to Cluj (bit city in Transilvania) for a weekend of fun and to get there I took a 5 hour train ride. In my train compartment was a man in his late twenties. When I first got on the train I was reading my book As I Lay Dying, he had a laptop and a blackberry from which he had created his own little office on his part of the almost empty compartment. At some point we were crossing the mountains which are still covered in snow and he commented in surprise about the snow and I commented about it and then he asked if I was from there and I said no and we started a conversation in which we discovered that he works for a company based out of Phoenix, Arizona, where my brother lives, he has an 11 month old child (yes, he showed me a picture of his baby in diapers on his cell phone), a high school friend who works in Seattle, a younger brother in college, he was going to Cluj for business and staying with someone he had never met so when he exited the train station all he knew to look for would be a green car.
It seems to be a general understanding that if you are traveling on a train, you are there to provide interesting conversation to whoever you are traveling with. I suppose sitting on seats that face each is always an added catalyst to this interaction.
Once I was in a train compartment with 5 other people, all over their 40's and all very talkative. During that trip I was told I would be perfect marriage material for Mama Doina's son (she told me to call her that), I should visit and stay with one of the women when I visit her side of Romania, I was asked why America is so hard to travel to, I was put on the phone with one of their neices who spoke English well ... and I said at one point that I had never tasted unfermented wine, which spurred a man who had not moved from his seat for two hours to take his backpack down and pull out a 2 liter bottle of unfermented wine for me to taste, after which the entire car took a sip (from the same 2 liter bottle).
Oh the Eastern Europe.