I’ve booked myself a train Leipzig, Germany, and two nights at a hostel there. The hostel has a laundry service and a fully stocked kitchen, which means I can cook the vegetables I bought in Dresden and also dry my clothes.

My boots are still sopping wet and cold. I’m sitting in the train station in the flip-flops I found in Berlin because I think it’s a better idea than putting those boots back on my feet right now. I probably should have just put up with the smell for another couple of days, but my embarrassment got the better of me. Thanks a lot, Cheese Guy.

The interior of the train station doesn’t have heat, so I am sitting in a patch of sunlight by a window. Kind of barefoot.

I’m doing okay.

Since I landed on this side of the pond, I have been surrounded by the street people. At least one person every day has approached me asking for a little money, or some food.

It started in Münster. I was sitting on a bench in the cobblestoned square by the Dom on a Sunday, and the sun was shining for the first time in days, and the church bells were chiming, and a scruffy looking man came up to me and asked me if I had a very specific quantity of change – maybe like 37 cents. He asked in German but I understood, which was a new and strange experience.

A few minutes later, and old woman walked over with a sign in English saying she needed donations for her hungry grandchildren. Her voice was low, and soft, and persistent, and sounded like a morning dove.

When I left the square – feeling a little shaken, this had never happened to me before – there was a woman sitting with her back to the stone foundation of a bakery. She held a paper cup in her hands, and she just smiled at me.

Another man sits everyday beside the entrance to the movie theater, with no paper cup, just a cupped and weathered hand, outstretched.

A few days later, a young woman asked me for money to help take care of her baby. She was younger than I am. I don’t know why, but there was something in her eyes I didn’t trust. Through a language barrier, I offered to buy her food. But she didn’t want food. I opened my wallet and she saw a twenty euro note and she asked if she could have it, so that she could feed her baby.

It was in that moment that I realized that I needed to learn how to say no.

At the bus station in Hamburg, a thin, friendly woman said “speak English? Could you possibly have any spare change?” and smiled conspiratorially, and winked.

Two minutes later, a man came up to me and asked for two Euros towards a barbecue sandwich from McDonalds. He told me that he really liked barbecue.

In Berlin, it was different.

I was walking downtown by the river and a woman marched right up to me and said, “speak English?” When I nodded, she showed me a piece of paper written in English that said she lived on the street and needed money for food. When I gave her a little she insisted on just a little more.

When I visited the East Side gallery, a woman with a clipboard approached me and asked me to sign a piece of paper to help her with her baby’s ear surgery – she told me he was deaf. I gave a little, I signed the clipboard. She got angry and upset with me for not giving her more, and I stood there not knowing what to do, and eventually said “I am sorry.” I walked away feeling angry at myself.

I was about a mile away when I realized that there was an orange in my backback that I could have given her, and I felt even worse.

Sitting with their backs to the Berlin Wall, there were two men with several paper cups and cardboard signs spread out in front of them. The generous could choose to contribute to their funds for either groceries, beer, weed, or LSD.

There were musicians. One man playing the accordion, another with a battered old violin.

There was a woman dressed up as a clown by the Brandenburg gate. “Photo, photo?” she asked, quite cheerfully, beckoning me over. I noticed that her teeth were almost brown. We took a selfie, and then she held out her hand for the spare change.

On my way out of Berlin I bought myself some chocolate, for medicinal purposes. I ended up giving most of it to an old man on the bridge by the train station.

Prague was the worst.

It was cold there, below freezing. And you couldn’t walk down a street in the old town without passing several of them. They knelt, bent over into something like a child’s pose, arms and hands extended holding paper cups, foreheads resting on the ground.

I saw a man eating rotten strawberries out of a trash can.

Many sat with puppies in their laps or wrapped up in blankets beside them – for the possible advantage of the cuteness factor, or for the added sympathy for having another mouth to feed, or for the warmth? I saw very few fully grown dogs, in Prague, and that haunted me.

In Krakow, Poland, a young, good looking fellow stopped me in the street and offered me a rose. He then produced a book and asked me to sign it. I didn’t have change, and I told him so. He took the flower back out of my hands, and walked away.

A few blocks later I happened upon a street vendor that was selling flowers, and noticed some familiar-looking roses.

There was a man standing by the entrance to a church, with his eyes closed and his hand outstretched. When I came back later he had gone, and an old woman stood there in his place.

Later, at night, an old man whose face looked like a skull sat with his back to the wall and a hat out in front of him, arms around his knees. When I walked past him the first time, he almost glared at me.

In Oświęcim… that was a different kind of place. A smaller town, where nobody really had any money. The only time I felt like someone wanted something from me was when I stood in front of the gallows at Auschwitz I, and that time I genuinely could do nothing.

Today, in Dresden – this is going to sound familiar, but – I’d bought myself some chocolate for medicinal purposes, and I found a room in the train station that was warm, with seats, and there was an old man there who was sleeping there and I – well.

When I stop and think, I can’t believe – I am twenty years old, and I didn’t know. I’d never seen. I have been so sheltered.

I can almost say that everything I have is in a backpack on my shoulders, that I can identify with these people. And then I remember that it isn’t true, because far away across an ocean there is a room in my parent’s house, and I’m not a materialistic human, but there are actually quite a lot of books there, and a pretty nice guitar, and there is clothing, and other things I have simply because I wanted them. I remember that I worked through some of high school and all of college, and that I qualified for aid from the state, and that I was unexpectedly gifted some funding towards school for being a halfway-decent student and writing scholarship applications well, and so I’m secure in the knowledge that I can put a roof over my own head every night, and that I can eat, and I have a degree and I have skills and when I get home I can go get a job, and I have identification papers and a bank account, that I have a car that’ll hopefully still work, for a little while longer.

So I can’t identify with their experiences. Not really.

But now I know. I don’t fully understand, I don’t know if I have earned the rite to say I can empathize.

I am sitting on a train to Leipzig, in a seat by the window where I can rest my feet beside the radiator, wondering what the hell I can do.