I'm traveling by train from London to Bucharest. It's not a well-planned trip. I booked the flight to London, and then decided to take the train to Bucharest from there. But the only way to fit in five days in Transylvania -- which I guess seemed essential at one time -- was to go straight from London to Munich, via Paris, without stopping anywhere for more than a few hours. It doesn't really make any sense to travel through London and Paris without stopping. But travel is all about self-discovery. Sometimes, what you discover is that you are dumb.
For the same basic reason, the flight was an overnight one. My plan for coping with it was to take all the sleeping pills in the world. There were risks: Someone else in the world might need a sleeping pill before new production could refill the warehouses; and if I took them too soon, I might pass out in the airport in a hoodie under a pile of bags, be mistaken for abandoned luggage, and get blown up by a robot.
The flight was awful, but the plan partly worked, in that I was conscious for only about half of it. That half was bad enough for three or four daytime flights. The plane was close to retirement -- a gigantic old two-level 747 with yellowed old overhead bins that rattled loudly as it lumbered down the runway. It was hard to believe that it could really fly; when the nose lifted, I genuinely felt some mild surprise.
At passport control, I had to explain why I'd written "one" under "days in the UK" on my landing card. The passport control officer was confused. "Why wouldn't you just fly to Munich?" Yes. Thank you.
To St. Pancras was an hour on the tube. That was the biggest part of my visit to the U.K. The next biggest was my visit to the St. Pancras Marks & Spencer, and then my time clearing security and customs for the Eurostar. The anxiety over terrorism is intense enough that you need to walk a block away from the station to find a garbage can, but the French guards doing the screening are pretty casual, exuding a faintly hostile ennui and responding to questions with disdainful shrugs. Do I need to take off this jacket for the metal detector? Should I take the laptop out and put it in a bin? No? I think I might have rabies and my backpack is full of mating rattlesnakes, is that a problem? Just get on with it? OK.
Even after security, the chunnel Eurostar's closer to air travel than any other train I've taken. Particularly the cost, which is whatever a computer thinks you're likely to pay at the moment you book it. On the continent, that sort of thing is judged to smack of the bloodsucking, Anglo-American side of capitalism, and train tickets more or less just cost what they cost -- as though they had some kind of fair or intrinsic value.
Another parallel between airlines and the Eurostar is that both are cramped and unpleasant. I signed up for a quiet carriage. Some people who book seats in quiet compartments do so because they don't make noise themselves and would prefer somewhere quiet. And some think, that's great! My colicky baby loves quiet!
My visit to Paris was a walk from Gare du Nord to Gare de l'Est, and a tiring 90 minutes hanging around Gare de l'Est waiting for my train to be announced. The compartment was a little three-person cabin with two of the bunks folded away to make my luxurious single compartment.
A very serious attendant came by to check my ticket and offer me breakfast. He spoke perfect English, but spoke it very baldly and sombrely. Was the breakfast vegetarian? He frowned. There was a muffin, he said. It all came in a box. There was bread. Sometimes, the bread had meat in it. That was what he had heard. Sometimes, he finished gravely, it was best not to know. I told him I wanted the breakfast, and the coffee that came with it, and that I didn't care what happened. And he nodded understandingly, as if this was exactly the kind of gloomy fatalism he could sympathize with.
When he was gone, I lay down for the first time in thirty hours. Just taking my shoes off was like a weekend at a spa. Whenever I stopped moving, I would start passing out. It was still the middle of the afternoon in my usual time zone, but I had a couple of long naps, and then slipped gratefully into a beautiful, five-hour coma.
When it ended, it was getting light. I watched orderly German farms go by for a while -- fields of something bright yellow, maybe canola, and a line of low mountains on the horizon. An announcement came on. It was in German, it was very long, it included a list of all the destinations of the train, and it sounded extraordinarily grave. With any other train crew, I would have guessed from the tone that all possible destinations had been annihilated in a nuclear strike and that we were doomed to lives of train-based Mad Max nomadism, snuffling around the ruined earth for food and gasoline. As it was, I thought, maybe there's been a problem with the muffins.
The English version was much shorter, and just noted that we would all be getting off the train at the next stop and that they were quite sorry about it.
The attendant came by with the breakfast all the same, and seemed sincerely sorry about me getting chucked off the train somewhere in the wrong part of Germany at 6AM. I chugged the coffee, dumped the breakfast box -- plastic-wrapped bread, orange juice in a box, a foil container of cheese, and the muffin -- into my backpack, and got off onto a cold platform where a bunch of other dazed-looking tourists were already standing around looking for other English-speakers to make bitter jokes about German efficiency to.
Some of the follow-up announcements about connections had contradicted each other, so I tried to find Munich on the posted schedules. It wasn't there. I stood around frowning for a while, followed some other tourists for a bit -- they didn't go anywhere useful or interesting -- and then went off and lined up at the information counter.
An official was working his way down the queue talking to people. When he reached me, I asked him whether he spoke English, and he sighed and said if necessary, yes. He was actually a bit haughty for the representative of a company that had just kicked me off a sleeper train at dawn 500km from my destination. Admittedly, it's probably not nice when North American tourists come to your country and expect you to speak their language, but I'd booked everything ahead of time precisely so I wouldn't have to wander around buffoonishly asking people if they spoke English and if they knew where I was. But the officious minor functionary is such an old and famous German stereotype that it would almost have been a shame not to meet one. It would be like going to Disneyland and not seeing Goofy. He did know where I was supposed to go ("oh, there's a connection in Mannheim?"; "In Mannheim, yes").
From Mannheim, there was a train to Munich, a three-hour high-speed train. Quite a beautiful, bullet-nosed train with power outlets and clean washrooms. I dug out the muffin. I wasn't sure whether you were allowed to eat on the train, but I ate it anyway as a gesture of rebuke and defiance. It turned out to be the kind of muffin that's impossible to eat without getting crumbs all over yourself and your neighbour, but that just made the statement all the more powerful, and I ate it anyway, with quiet dignity. To me, eating a muffin is almost always a social statement. I don't even like muffins all that much.
I left my laptop on that train, which was awkward.
For the same basic reason, the flight was an overnight one. My plan for coping with it was to take all the sleeping pills in the world. There were risks: Someone else in the world might need a sleeping pill before new production could refill the warehouses; and if I took them too soon, I might pass out in the airport in a hoodie under a pile of bags, be mistaken for abandoned luggage, and get blown up by a robot.
The flight was awful, but the plan partly worked, in that I was conscious for only about half of it. That half was bad enough for three or four daytime flights. The plane was close to retirement -- a gigantic old two-level 747 with yellowed old overhead bins that rattled loudly as it lumbered down the runway. It was hard to believe that it could really fly; when the nose lifted, I genuinely felt some mild surprise.
At passport control, I had to explain why I'd written "one" under "days in the UK" on my landing card. The passport control officer was confused. "Why wouldn't you just fly to Munich?" Yes. Thank you.
To St. Pancras was an hour on the tube. That was the biggest part of my visit to the U.K. The next biggest was my visit to the St. Pancras Marks & Spencer, and then my time clearing security and customs for the Eurostar. The anxiety over terrorism is intense enough that you need to walk a block away from the station to find a garbage can, but the French guards doing the screening are pretty casual, exuding a faintly hostile ennui and responding to questions with disdainful shrugs. Do I need to take off this jacket for the metal detector? Should I take the laptop out and put it in a bin? No? I think I might have rabies and my backpack is full of mating rattlesnakes, is that a problem? Just get on with it? OK.
Even after security, the chunnel Eurostar's closer to air travel than any other train I've taken. Particularly the cost, which is whatever a computer thinks you're likely to pay at the moment you book it. On the continent, that sort of thing is judged to smack of the bloodsucking, Anglo-American side of capitalism, and train tickets more or less just cost what they cost -- as though they had some kind of fair or intrinsic value.
Another parallel between airlines and the Eurostar is that both are cramped and unpleasant. I signed up for a quiet carriage. Some people who book seats in quiet compartments do so because they don't make noise themselves and would prefer somewhere quiet. And some think, that's great! My colicky baby loves quiet!
My visit to Paris was a walk from Gare du Nord to Gare de l'Est, and a tiring 90 minutes hanging around Gare de l'Est waiting for my train to be announced. The compartment was a little three-person cabin with two of the bunks folded away to make my luxurious single compartment.
A very serious attendant came by to check my ticket and offer me breakfast. He spoke perfect English, but spoke it very baldly and sombrely. Was the breakfast vegetarian? He frowned. There was a muffin, he said. It all came in a box. There was bread. Sometimes, the bread had meat in it. That was what he had heard. Sometimes, he finished gravely, it was best not to know. I told him I wanted the breakfast, and the coffee that came with it, and that I didn't care what happened. And he nodded understandingly, as if this was exactly the kind of gloomy fatalism he could sympathize with.
When he was gone, I lay down for the first time in thirty hours. Just taking my shoes off was like a weekend at a spa. Whenever I stopped moving, I would start passing out. It was still the middle of the afternoon in my usual time zone, but I had a couple of long naps, and then slipped gratefully into a beautiful, five-hour coma.
When it ended, it was getting light. I watched orderly German farms go by for a while -- fields of something bright yellow, maybe canola, and a line of low mountains on the horizon. An announcement came on. It was in German, it was very long, it included a list of all the destinations of the train, and it sounded extraordinarily grave. With any other train crew, I would have guessed from the tone that all possible destinations had been annihilated in a nuclear strike and that we were doomed to lives of train-based Mad Max nomadism, snuffling around the ruined earth for food and gasoline. As it was, I thought, maybe there's been a problem with the muffins.
The English version was much shorter, and just noted that we would all be getting off the train at the next stop and that they were quite sorry about it.
The attendant came by with the breakfast all the same, and seemed sincerely sorry about me getting chucked off the train somewhere in the wrong part of Germany at 6AM. I chugged the coffee, dumped the breakfast box -- plastic-wrapped bread, orange juice in a box, a foil container of cheese, and the muffin -- into my backpack, and got off onto a cold platform where a bunch of other dazed-looking tourists were already standing around looking for other English-speakers to make bitter jokes about German efficiency to.
Some of the follow-up announcements about connections had contradicted each other, so I tried to find Munich on the posted schedules. It wasn't there. I stood around frowning for a while, followed some other tourists for a bit -- they didn't go anywhere useful or interesting -- and then went off and lined up at the information counter.
An official was working his way down the queue talking to people. When he reached me, I asked him whether he spoke English, and he sighed and said if necessary, yes. He was actually a bit haughty for the representative of a company that had just kicked me off a sleeper train at dawn 500km from my destination. Admittedly, it's probably not nice when North American tourists come to your country and expect you to speak their language, but I'd booked everything ahead of time precisely so I wouldn't have to wander around buffoonishly asking people if they spoke English and if they knew where I was. But the officious minor functionary is such an old and famous German stereotype that it would almost have been a shame not to meet one. It would be like going to Disneyland and not seeing Goofy. He did know where I was supposed to go ("oh, there's a connection in Mannheim?"; "In Mannheim, yes").
From Mannheim, there was a train to Munich, a three-hour high-speed train. Quite a beautiful, bullet-nosed train with power outlets and clean washrooms. I dug out the muffin. I wasn't sure whether you were allowed to eat on the train, but I ate it anyway as a gesture of rebuke and defiance. It turned out to be the kind of muffin that's impossible to eat without getting crumbs all over yourself and your neighbour, but that just made the statement all the more powerful, and I ate it anyway, with quiet dignity. To me, eating a muffin is almost always a social statement. I don't even like muffins all that much.
I left my laptop on that train, which was awkward.
