Midnight Train

So not quite a midnight train, but I took an overnight train to Paris from Madrid. The day I spent in Madrid was terrible, something like 39 degrees celsius. The train, in constrast was nice and cool and air conditioned...

Seats were big and spacious, food was good, but the best part was the view. My favorite realization was when we crossed into France in the morning, and I realized that there were wild poppies at the side of the tracks.

Something I found odd though was that there were no announcements on the train, ever. Not that they would have helped me much...but in the end, our train was almost 1.5 hours late. I had budgeted 1.5 hours to transfer to another train in Paris...and by the time I got to the station, my train had left 30 minutes ago. *sigh* I was not impressed.

I knew that there was another train in 45 minutes, so I hurried to a ticket counter in order to buy a new ticket. Little did I expect that I would spend an hour in line waiting...and since it was almost lunch time, many of the ticket counters were closing in front of my eyes despite the growing lineups. I was not impressed. Thankfully, my new ticket had not cost me anything because of my train pass, the downside being it was a local train instead of the high speed train I had originally paid for. I was originally scheduled to get into Grenoble for 12:55, and finally made it at 8:20pm, after two additional trains and a transfer.

During this fiasco in Paris, I ended up spending some time at all three train stations, Lyon, Austerlitz, and Bercy. In all I spent roughly 3 hours in Paris - I was not impressed at all. It was hot, smelly, crowded, and not very pretty at all. From what I have seen, Paris is definitely overrated. We will see if this weekend's trip to Paris for 3 days changes my mind...hopefully!

- S