Europe Trip: Chapter 2

At the end of our last chapter, our heroes had defeated the evil hotel lock and had been reunited with their possessions. What awaits them now?

We head out of the hotel, and back to the subway station. We decide to visit a museumish area of Brussels, and head down to the Schuman subway stop which is close to a large park called the Cinquantenaire. After grabbing lunch at a little cafe, we look at an art museum there (Greeks were very obsessed with male genitalia) and a military history museum. We then head to a restaurant called the Carpe Diem on the advice of a fellow at the Autoworld museum, and have a delicious meal. While enjoying supper, we watch the traffic chaos at an intersection just outside the restaurant - the lights are a bit confusing to me (a red light, a green cross, and a red arrow - what the bloody hell is a green cross?) and I become much happier with our decision to take the train over driving (not to mention that the vast majority of European cars are standard, and I have no clue how to drive a standard).

After supper, we get on the subway at Merode station (it's right outside the restaurant we ate at) and head back to the hotel. We breathe a sigh of relief when the key works, and promptly fall asleep again (still trying to recover from the flight and time change). The next morning, we grab breakfast and check out without incident, and head to the train station. As we are walking into Brussels Midi station, we are again struck by the overwhelming smell of urine, and I'm convinced by the hideous smell and the long stream of liquid that every homeless person within a few kilometres is making a sport of pissing on the garbage can right beside the front door. We find our train without incident, and hop aboard a Thalys heading towards Paris. We are planning on meeting up with my mother and sister and two of my aunts in Paris for around 12:30 at their hotel (which is very close to our Paris hotel), and everything is going well until the train comes to a stop 5 minutes after leaving Brussels. We end up sitting there for close to a half hour, and finally pull into Gare Du Nord station in Paris around 40 minutes late. We get off the train...

...and you know what ... means by now.

Interesting factoid of the day: The French TGV trains have the current world speed record for conventional trains, beating out the Thalys, Eurostar, and ICE trains by going an average of 515 km/h in a high-speed test run.

Europe Trip: Chapter 1

So, in the last episode our heroes were just approaching the gate upon arrival at Frankfurt Airport.

We pull up to the gate, and it's about a half hour earlier than expected (it's 11:15ish, and we were supposed to arrive at 11:45). We take some stairs down onto the tarmac, and take a bus to the main airport building. We wait in line for customs, and pass through without incident after a bit of a wait. Since we're travelling with only carry-on luggage, we are able to completely bypass the luggage carousel and head for the door - ever since I first travelled carry-on only to San Francisco, I've gotten addicted to not having to wait for my luggage for a half hour.

We head out of the airport terminal and over to the train station - Frankfurt airport has a very nice setup for this, with a major train station attached directly to the airport. It means that there's no need for airport shuttles, and no complicated transfers - follow the sign to the trains, and you can be on one of Germany's ICE trains (InterCityExpress, speeds over 300km/h) in a very short period of time.

Since we're going to be doing a lot of train travel, we crunched the numbers in advance and determined that a Eurail pass was the best way to go. The pass that we chose allowed us to use the train for 8 days (not necessarily in a row - the only limitation is that all 8 days have to be used within 2 months of validation) for 4 bordering countries (Germany, Belgium, France, Austria), and we get to travel in first class. We have to get this validated before we can use it though, and there ended up being quite a lineup. Thankfully, when we got through to the end the fellow we spoke with knew English, so we were able to get things done with a minimum of hand gestures and charades. After validating the pass, we figured out the best schedule to get to Brussels, our first stop (it's often spelt Bruxelles, and that caused confusion at points) - we'd go to Cologne (Köln) and wait for a couple of hours, and then catch a Thalys train to Brussels (Thalys is another high-speed train - it primarily does the Paris-Köln route). There was a second option which would have allowed us to continue on from Köln almost immediately, but that train was fully reserved - it's May Day weekend, so the lines to Paris are pretty busy. Hopefully that won't cause us more headaches later on.

Travelling on the ICE was a fun experience. It's a very comfortable train, and it goes along at a very good speed (the highest I remember was ~323km/h). They are very punctual schedule-wise, and it's probably the fastest way to get around Germany in most cases (with plane travel, there's a lot of song and dance around getting the ticket, security, traffic at the airport, etc. which turns a 2 hour flight into 5 hours of lost time).

We got into Köln in good time, and strolled around the station for a bit. We booked a bunch of reservations on trains we would be taking later in the trip (e.g. Brussels -> Paris, Arras -> Berlin), and took pictures of a gigantic cathedral right outside the main train station. Then we hopped onto the Thalys train to Brussels - like the ICE, it was a very good experience, and we covered the distance between Köln and Brussels in 2 hours.

The first thing I noticed about the Brussels Midi train station is that it had pickpocket warnings on all the monitors. The second thing I noticed is that it stunk quite badly of urine - this was something I noticed in Paris as well. We found the subway about as quickly as we could, and took it to the stop closest to our hotel (King Baudouin station). Upon exiting the subway station, we saw a very bizarre (and very shiny) structure which we later found out was called the Atomium. We found our hotel without problems (Holiday Inn Garden Court), and dropped off our things. It had been close to 2 days since we showered (overnight flight combined with lots of train travel), so we promptly showered and then went out for supper at a nearby restaurant.

Until this point, everything was going fine.

When we returned to the hotel, our key wouldn't open our hotel room. After trying it a few times, I went down to the desk and told them about the problem. They re-encoded the card, and told me to try again. After confirming that it still didn't work, they accompanied me upstairs with the master key. When they tried that, they found that it also didn't work - it was time to call a technician. He showed up about an hour later, and played around with a little keypad that plugged into the door. He tried several things, and was at a loss to explain why the lock refused to open. They tried to call another technician, but they couldn't get ahold of him - we'd have to wait until tomorrow.

Fantastic.

They gave us another room along with a bunch of toiletries, and apologized profusely for the problems. I was glad at this point that I'd taken out my contacts - they had no contact solution, so I would have either had to throw them out or risk scratching my retinas by leaving them in overnight. We got to sleep quickly (we were dead tired), and I woke up around 7 a.m. or so. I decided to get dressed and grab some breakfast, and I checked on the busted door on the way down - still nothing. After eating a bit, a technician showed up, so I followed along as he got to work on the door. After about 20 minutes, he declared that it was beyond his capabilities and that we'd have to contact a specialist - the closest one was in the Netherlands, so it'd be a few hours. Around this time, I started asking if they had an axe in the hotel as it might end up being the only way to get into the room - a bit of nervous laughter was heard from the staff, and the specialist was called.

Several glasses of tea and a couple of croissants later, the Dutch technician showed up. He got to work with a wrench and a drill, and started to disassemble parts of the door lock. He was fiddling with a mechanism inside the handle, and I strolled off and looked at another hotel room door (it was around 11 at this point, so rooms were being cleaned). I figured that it might be possible to slip the door open with a credit card-like piece of plastic, and he ran off and grabbed something like it. After a couple minutes of fighting with the door, it finally popped open - hooray! Victory at last!

We grabbed all of our stuff, and moved it up to the new hotel room. The staff, who were very happy to learn that the door was finally open, apologized profusely (again) and said that the first night and two days of breakfast would be free as compensation for our problems - they also sent us a fruit basket and a couple of bottles of fancy Belgian water (Apollinaris). We showered, got changed, and headed out for our first day in Brussels...

...which is covered in Chapter 2.

Interesting factoid of the day: Euro coins, which are minted in 12 countries, all have the same front part. However, the back of the coin is done differently depending upon the country of origin - for example, the German 2 Euro coin has an eagle on the back, the French 2 Euro coin has a fancy pattern with a female statue and Republique Francaise on it, and the Austrian 2 Euro coin has a former Austrian Queen on it.

Europe Trip: Prelude

Today begins a series of blog entries about my trip to Europe, which wrapped up yesterday. As with any good story, I'll start at the beginning.

The date: Thursday April 27th

Today, I'm getting ready to leave for Europe. A good deal of the packing and getting things ready was done last night, and today I have to drive the dogs to Woodstock (to my wife's family) so that they don't starve to death while we're gone. My wife, who is "working" from home that day, decides to accompany me on the trip (it's ~2 hours there and 2 hours back).

As we're heading out, I plug in my iPod to the car stereo, only to see a folder icon pop up that says to call Apple support - fantastic. I decide to reimage it when I get home and reupload a bunch of music so I have something to listen to, but upon returning home I discover that the iPod won't even mount correctly on the computer - it's making clicking noises, and acting rather like a useless paperweight. Now I'm seeing a sad Mac icon (well, sad iPod), and I have no music for the next month. That'll end up sucking some serious ass down the road, I'm sure.

By the time we end up getting home and getting everything packed, it's too late to take the subway/bus to the airport, so we cough up $50 and take a cab. We get there a little less than 2 hours before (2 hours is how far in advance you're supposed to be there for international flights), but doing an electronic check-in saves us a lot of time and we get through security with 90 minutes to spare. Since we are travelling with only carry-on baggage, we don't have anything to check, and we don't have anything to wait for once we arrive in Frankfurt. I decide to get a coffee while I'm waiting, and win a free cup of coffee - finally something's going right. I also decide to pick up a couple of books ("Why Most Things Fail" by Paul Ormerod, and "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell), since I no longer have music to amuse me.

We get on the flight without incident, and pack our carry-on bags into the overhead bins - that means more leg room for the overnight flight to Frankfurt, which is good. The flight leaves at 10 p.m. EST (GMT -5), and arrives at 11:45 a.m. CET (GMT + 1) - that's a 6 hour difference, combined with a 7.5 hour overnight flight - party central. As expected, sleep is fleeting and uncomfortable, and there's only about 4 hours of true darkness before we find the sun again. As patches of land start to appear, I see Europe for the first time - there's an awful lot of green patches, and clumps of cities at frequent intervals. We pass over the UK, France, and Belgium, and come in to land at the Frankfurt airport about 30 minutes ahead of schedule. We come up to the gate, and...

...my first 24 hours in Europe will be in the next entry. Don't you hate cliffhangers? :)

Interesting factoid of the day: There are 2 Frankfurts in Germany, and I went through them both. Frankfurt am Main is located on the Main river, and is in the midwestern portion of Germany, in the state of Hesse. Frankfurt an der Oder is located on the Oder river, and it is in the extreme east of the country, in the state of Brandenburg on the Polish border (on the main Berlin-to-Warsaw rail line).

Poland

I'm now in Poland, time is short.

I'll write more later, but the way to survive is to glare at people until they look away.

Fun times.

La belle Paris

I'm sitting in a cafe right now across from Gare de Lyon in Paris, enjoying a cheese and tomato sandwich with a cheese and tomato salad (mmmm cheeese and tomatoes). It's been absolutely fantastic to not have to worry about anything for the last few days, given how busy work has been for the last long while.

Later today, we go to Versailles. I've done the Eiffel Tower, done the Louvre, been to Brussels for a couple of days, and heading to Caen tomorrow. I'll write up more details when I have more time, but time is short right now - have to finish lunch and catch a train.