Awesome thing #342 about Germany: The trains

Day 5 in the motherland. Germany continues to impress me. Remember my big cultural lesson about how great the French train system was? I think I was coming from an uninformed perspective. Any train system looks great next to the relatively nonexistent one in the United States.

1. German trains are actually on time. Inconceivable! Lindsey and I have been taking the train daily for our day trips and never once has a train been late. It's nice to know that you can count on making a connection and that you can accurately plan your day.
2. German trains actually check your tickets. This is nice because a lot of the time on French trains I wondered why I had wasted my money on a ticket they wouldn't even check (the answer: because I am honest).
    
3. German trains give you great stories. Friday night train rides out of Munich have no shortage of activity. Lindsey and I were accused (in German) of being Chelsea fans by a dusty old German man drinking beer from his backpack. Another older German man heard us speaking English and asked if we could explain the one English word he didn't understand: stillbirth (he had seen it in a health warning on his cigars). At one point, the four German men in our car were shouting about the upcoming Champions League Final match this weekend and all Lindsey and I could understand were town names and Amerika and JA!!! Never a dull moment.

I, of course, will be cheering for FC Bayern

Trains, planes, and automobiles. But especially trains.

French Cultural Lesson # 8: Le Train

The very first thing I did when I got to France was take a train to Montpellier. I remember feeling so French as I took the TGV for the first time and watched the French countryside whiz by. Throughout my stay here, I've really gotten to know the train system.

The Good: 
Unlike chez moi (back in the States), the train is really the mode of travel here. While there tends to be a Paris-centroism to the system, the network of rail is fairly extensive. In fact, I have done a majority of my traveling by train:

• Montpellier
• Avignon
• Nice
• Grasse
• Beaulieu-sur-mer
• Nimes
• Sète
• Cannes
• Antibes
• Monaco
• Menton
• Ventimille, Italy
• Paris
• Versailles

Also, in the French style of offering great discounts to people under 25 (something I'm going to miss a lot when I go back home), there is a discount card you can buy called the douze-vignt-cinq (the 12-25) which is for travelers between those ages. I've used the train so much that the card paid for itself in the first month, and I'd really recommend it to anyone with an extended stay in France who is planning to travel by train!

The bad:

The SNCF (the organization that runs the trains) has a reputation of being a little disorganized. Trains are often behind schedule, sometimes two trains leave from the same platforms at essentially the same time, etc. Suffice it to say, we have had our fair share of train fiascoes. The tardiness of trains is somewhat of a joke among French people. Back in March, a law was passed that requires the SNCF to refund your ticket if you miss a connecting train due to a delay (which seems like an obvious responsibility in my American eyes..).



The ugly:

They don't all look like this, I swear.

Le gare du nord? More like, la labyrinthe du nord!

Peur du jour- 17 Avril 2012: Navigating that thing they call a train station

So on this Tuesday morning, I woke up early to go fetch my friend Jack from the train station. I left myself plenty of time to stop by the bakery (friends who visit me in France get a complimentary pain au chocolat), take the 45 minute metro ride, and find the platform to be there when his train arrived.

Little did I know, le gare du nord is a maze of underground tunnels and misleading signs when you're coming from the metro station. I got off the metro and started following the signs to le gare when I ran into another line of ticket-takers. I had already swiped my ticket to get on the metro, so I thought those tickets must have been for the RER train or another line. Plan B brought me up the escalator and into the gray morning (note the weather change...). I was kind of just going with what I remembered seeing on maps and what I thought to be North and South when I picked which direction to start walking.

As it would happen, my often-excellent sense of direction was spot on and I made it to le gare in about three minutes. Inside, I started following the signs to les grandes lignes where my friend's train would come in. This sounds simple enough but for the fact that sometimes the signs would just disappear and you would have no idea whether to go up, down, left, right, forward, backward, diagonal, or what have you. At one point I was back in the metro and was forced to use a metro ticket to follow the grandes lignes signs.

Goodness gracious, Paris.

Naturally, as I fumbled around with escalators and hallways, I started imagining the worst. I wasn't sure that my friend would have a working cellphone and I wasn't even sure that he had put my number in his phone. What would happen if he got off the train and couldn't find me? How would we find each other? (Kathleen, stop freaking out.)

Eventually I resurfaced, found the platform, and bought some hot chocolate to hand to my sleep-deprived friend as he got off the train. And we had quite the lovely day (despite the pouring rain...)

Jack and me at Versailles! (in the rain)

Elyse and I doing a myspace style photo in the Hall of Mirrors

Slap happy after being so cold and wet...

And then it turned into a beautiful evening

Our view from the top of the arc de triomphe