The beginnings of a different short story...I was going to finish the whole thing until I realized how long it was going to be; so sue me

The clock display on my cell phone reads 8:24 (or 20:24, as they tend to refer to eight P.M. around these parts), which means I have approximately thirty six minutes to get to Astrid Station, well thirty three minutes to get there and another three to get up the stairs and onto the sidewalk and pretend like I'm not freezing and anxious past the point of terrified. Of course that's assuming this very large, very black (not very positively a) woman moves before the door shuts on her fat ass.
I suppose the aspect of Antwerp that I'm most surprised at is how much it doesn't seem like it's part of Belgium, though my conception of Begium at this point in my life is not terribly realized and perhaps I just don't know Belgium as well as I'd like to think. But then again, I was in Brussels just six days ago and the eight euro Neopolitan Pizzas served by a militant Francophone queer in a hole in the wall café in a neighborhood that's a straight, greyer cousin of San Francisco's Castro District is a far cry from the shabbily-upholstered bus mounted on a rail I'm in the process of boarding, the only truly white person (at this stop, anyway).
The fat bitch has finally moved out of the way, just a few instants prior to clicking-shut of the doors to the tram and the almost instantaneously-subsequent transition of said tram's velocity from non-existent to, um, fast. I don't waste time and plant my butt in the first empty aisle seat I see while she waddles to the back to the only one physically able to accomodate her. By this time it's 8--no, 20, we'll just 20:29 and I think that if this is not Belgium then it must be Bosnia, because it's not fair to change the name of a place you're in unless you at least stay within the same first letter. The language of the people seems close enough to what I heard in Rotterdam--where they speak Dutch, a cousin of the "Flemish" they speak here--, a surprise in itself, a veritable cesspool on the scale of Detroit, its only redeeming factor a bane as well as a result of circumstance and not absolute: it was so frigid--during the second week of June no less--that I was unable to smell the probably putrid, obviously slum-dwelling black and brown and grey and people of all sorts of colors that exited the commonplace shopping mall housing the overpriced McDonald's at which I'd just dropped four euros--which was, last I checked, about six dollars, to feast on a burger one-half the size--and even lower quality if that's even possible--of its American counterpart, and a medium fry which would have been surpassed in scope by even the least generous, spilled kid's fry.
But that makes me sound like a bigoted American and I've always been an outspoken proponent of the "Europe is better than America" bandwagon and it seems I have digressed and it seems we've now entered the tunnel which now means my ramblings and my frustrations will be confined to dark for the next seventeen minutes--well, fourteen; I forgot about the three minute cushion I built in.
My cell phone vibrates once; there goes another ninety-nine American cents. Of course it's Hugo. He assumes that I have decided to cancel without, well, cancelling, and perhaps I have; there are another four stops between here--wherever I am right now; I have not paid attention since what was left of the bright light of today vanished--and Astrid Station and I could easily get off and turn around with any further expense; they never seem to verify whether you've paid so I've nothing to lose. I do not respond to his message; if he asks when and if I arrive I'll attribute it to my cheapness, though my reaction to his message just makes me feel even more justified in my previous desire not to get on this little vacuum tube and return innocently back to Marta's house and eat more of her parent's home and siphon off more of their good graces and parade around smiling like the good-natured American they think I am, oblivious to the fact that I spend late nights and early mornings--for which I still tell myself I am awake due my biological clock's stubborness in adjusting to the seven hour time difference between here and home--chatting online with strange men that are far stranger than any of their American counterparts, if only because their English is, at best, good, and any oddity in their rhetoric toward me could just as likely be heard as something less odd than it is when it is actually far more sinister. And last time I checked, well the only time I checked, and by checked I mean he said it to me awkwardly and in passing as if it was his nickname, Hugo was in Belgium by way of Russia and before that one of the now autonomous Russian Republics, so I really don't know what I'm getting into, a fact made even more tragic in that I now remember just how grainy and fake his photos look.
The very cool though perhaps--well not perhaps, definitely bizarre thing about these trams is that announcements for stations arrivals play in English. They don't play in Flemish or Dutch and/of French first; they just play it in English. On most days I found that cool, save the fact that it once again allowed me to scoot by as an internationally-biased liberal American who is only fluent--and less so that he likes to let on--in a language he learned in school that's not strange or difficult at all, but today it only aided in increasing the rate at which my balls ascended back up into me--that's my fancy way of saying I'm scared--when I realized, save a natural disasted--I would be at Astrid Station in less than a minute, which was actually an overestimation it seems; the doors are opening now.
My already reluctant de-boarding is made even more uncomfortable as fatty from before magically manifests herself directly behind me--I can feel her breath on my back even through my track jacket--and basically pushes me off of the tram with my rolls; before I even have a chance to get upset with her and have it be worth something, the tram is gone, a now vacant track behind me, a schedule board in front, benches to sit upon and wait to my right, and then the stair and escalator to the mustard yellow-walled station exit to my left. I go left because if I didn't he'd come down and find me anyway and knowing my luck he'd probably push me down onto the tracks in convenient proximity to the arrival of the next tram.
As I (very) slowly ascend the escalator, the truly unfortunate extent of the yellow walls' mustardness begins to reveal itself, and it's interesting to be talking about the color yellow now, because one of the nasty people from the tram turns around and shouts something in Bosni--no, Flemish, to him comrade who's apparently behind me somewhere and his teeth were pretty yellow and I think I smell some sort of piss--though not definitely animal or human (probably both)--and as I make a quick left off the escalator I feel blessed: there is one more left turn and another escalator--or at least I hope/think that's what I hear--in front of me.