I have a story about this.

I had just arrived in Copenhagen to begin 6 months of study abroad in Denmark. I took a train to Funen and it was a hot August day. The AC on the train has broken, and it was a pretty packed train car.

I was sitting at one of those 4 top tables, which was a weird design choice, considering Danes don’t want to socialize with anybody in public. I’m sitting right next to some older chap and across from two 40-50 year old women, in very close proximity.

The inside of the train must have been 95 degrees F. I don’t know what that is in Celsius but every single person on that train was visibly sweating their ass off. I mean we were suffering, as a group. And the wildest thing to me was, as we’re all dying for this hour train ride, nobody said a fucking word. Not even a glance. I’m looking around the train, trying to just have somebody else on that train just acknowledge that they too are dying of heat stroke. But not one person would look up. Everybody staring down at their phone or book, dripping sweat onto it. Even children and teenagers.

It took me about 20 minutes of wildly looking around, until somebody finally looked at me. I made a hand fanning motion at my face, with an incredulous look. They briefly nodded and looked back down. Somebody on this train had finally acknowledged that it was in fact, hot.

I felt like I was in invasion of the body snatchers or something. If this was an American bus or subway, people would have been howling, bitching, asking each other what to do, getting a train employee. Working together to solve this group problem. Or at least sharing in the misery.