NEW YEAR MEANS NO MORE POP CULTURE REFERENCES IN THE TITLE NO ONE GETS THEM ANYWAY
HEY LOOK EVERYONE! PICTURES!!!
Remember when I said I was working on writing about Paris?
But here's what happened following that first journal entry.
I pulled into Munich and subsequently failed to get on my next train because the ticket counter was closed, and the ticket machines did not show the train. The next train left at three in the morning, so I waited at the train station.
Bad idea. It turns out train folk are like bus folk: weird and creepy. It didn't help that it was cold either. I didn't even find the waiting room until after midnight, so I spent over two hours freezing my butt off.
Inside the waiting room, it was warm, but there was this angry British guy trying to talk to the Germans there about why artists shouldn't be mad about being paid less than others. He kept switching back and forth between English and German.
It's strange. People usually look at German as a very "angry" language, all hard consonants and short words that stack like danish interlocking blocks, but both the guy and the Germans he was talking to seemed really calm while talking in German. It was only when the dude tried to make a point in English, that his temper seemed to flare.
So, I didn't sleep at all, and three o' clock rolled around. My next train was a DB Bahn high speed train to Cologne. It was less cleaner than the Railjet from Budapest, but still quite clean.
Cologne was probably the most interesting train station I stopped in. Outside of one of the entrances, there was a cool church. From Cologne, I had to take a Thalys train to Paris. Thalys was terrible. First off, I had to pay 36 euro to reserve my seat on it, which is just way too much for someone who has a eurail pass already. Secondly, the decor of the trains was ugly. Whoever thought that bright purple was a good choice for the interior of a train should be fired immediately.
I got into Paris at around noon and got to my hotel. It was kinda sketchy and tiny, but it was clean, which is all I could ask for. The front desk said I could not check in until 2 o'clock, so I took this opportunity to explore the city.
Paris is confusing. I started out just picking a direction to walk in (turned out that I was walking north) and just going. I eventually made it to some sort of basilica, where I was promptly hustled for my money from a deaf chick. Continuing my trek north for about an hour, I realized that I was not walking to any landmark at all, and promptly turned around.
Unfortunately, I missed a turn or something, because I got lost. So I spent the next two hours trying to navigate myself back to the hotel. Once I got back, I paid 10 euro for a days worth of internet and promptly passed out.