Well, I survived the semester more or less successfully and now find myself in the Austrian alps with a fair amount of time on my hands since I’m not much of a skier (and I really don’t have the appropriate outerwear for these kinds of activities – somehow snowpants didn’t make it through my final round of packing cuts…). So while my friends are outside skiing, I’m loving the opportunity to sit inside and type up some blog entries and emails. Granted, I can’t post or send these things just yet – we don’t have wifi here, so this will be a few days old by the time I actually put it up.
We do have just about everything else I could want though – like free breakfast with unlimited hot chocolate :). The hotel is actually really nice, especially because we have the place entirely to ourselves now. And by “ourselves” I mean 32 Notre Dame and St. Mary’s students, as well as one guy’s family. I knew (at least vaguely) the 3 other ND girls and 5 ND guys ahead of time, but I didn’t know any of the St. Mary’s girls, so I’m definitely meeting new people.
To get to the Alps, I used my Eurail Pass. After much debate and calculation, I went with a 1 month Global Pass, which gives me “free” access to train travel in 21 European countries for one month (30 days). I say “free” because 1. I had to pay 535 euro for this rail pass and 2. Sometimes you have to make reservations for trains – overnight and high-speed trains, but thankfully these reservations are usually only 3-4 euro each. So I started my pass on Monday night with a night train from Paris to Munich. That was my first time on a night train and it was definitely an interesting experience. I, being a cheapskate, naturally only paid the 4 euro to reserve a normal seat instead of the like 30 euro or whatever it would have been to reserve a sleeping car. So I was in a compartment of 6 seats – 2 sets of 3 seats facing each other. Of course, I ended up with a middle seat – not exactly ideal for a nearly 12 hour train ride. However, when the train pulled out of the station in Paris, there were only 4 people in my compartment, and soon after we left, the other girl left to go sit with friends in another compartment, so there were only 3 of us, which was excellent. My compartment mates were a French guy my age who studies in Lille and was on his way to visit his girlfriend in Zagreb and a grown Turkish man going to Munich to spend Christmas with his father whom he hadn’t seen for 40 years. The French guy spoke fairly good English and also a little bit of German, but the Turkish guy only knew a few words of English and neither French nor German, which made it basically impossible to include him in conversation and after awhile we gave up entirely.
The French guy and I had a great conversation though – in French and in English. We covered American politics, urban planning, and the history of money among other topics. He described himself as politically left of the French left, which means he was a communist. I wish I had asked him if he identified with a particular party because I just learned about the extreme left in my French politics class. Fun fact: France has 4, yes 4, communist parties; 1 standard Communist Party which is Stalinist, and 3 distinct Trotskyite parties. But anyway, this kid was fairly liberal to say the least, and really like to hear himself talk about all of the things wrong with the world today, so we had a fairly lengthy conversation. One of the things we really argued over was his critique of the American university system as far too expensive. He also very openly scoffed at my copy of the European edition of the Wall Street Journal.
At any rate, our conversation eventually tapered off around 1am and I tried to get some sleep, which went fairly well until we picked up 2 more passengers in my car. A Slovenian man (who was also fluent in German) and his like 6 year old daughter. So we were up to 5 passengers in the 6 passenger car and I had to go back to my middle seat between the Turkish man and the Slovenia man for the rest of the night, so the last 7 hours of the ride were significantly less comfortable than the first 5. We made several stops in the middle of the night, including one really long one during which half of our train split off and continued to Berlin and then Moscow and my half of the train had to wait to join up with another train coming from Amsterdam, but the train from Amsterdam had been delayed because of weather, so we ended up delayed too. We got to Munich about a full hour later than we had been expected too, but fortunately I hadn’t reserved my next train, so I didn’t miss any necessary connections, unlike my new French friend, who had to find a new train to Zagreb…
Figuring out the next leg of my journey was a little confusing. I knew what train I wanted to be on from Munich, but I wasn’t sure if I could just get on to it with just my rail pass and without a ticket. Turns out I could, which I learned fairly easily from a woman in the ticket office. So I went to the train and walked into a second-class car, only to find that all of the seats were marked “RESERVIAT”, which I took to mean they were reserved/people had tickets for those specific seats even though most of them were unoccupied at the time. I walked all the way through all of the cars of the train looking for a seat that didn’t say “Reserviat”, to no avail. So I was like, great, the woman in the ticket office must have misunderstood me, and I really did need to get a ticket/reservation. But there wasn’t enough time for me to go get a ticket and still make that train, which was the latest one I had looked up info for in advance, so I went and tried to ask an older train employee on the platform where I could sit if I didn’t have a reservation. He spoke little English, but I was pretty sure he understood and told me to go to the last car. So I grabbed a seat at the very back, still nervous that I wasn’t allowed to be there. I was also nervous because the stop I was getting off at wasn’t listed as one of the stops for the train (turns out it was just a small town and the train didn’t list all of the stops on the platform, but for awhile I was worried that I might wind up in Bologna since that was the direction of the train listed…).
But I had only been sitting for about two minutes when two guys my age walked into the car, clearly also looking for non-reserved seats. Moreover, one of them was wearing a hat with the Georgetown bulldog on it and the other one had a nalgene covered in stickers in English. So I went ahead and correctly inferred that they were Americans. Turns out they had the same kind of rail pass as me and were also trying to figure out where they could sit, so we bonded over that and figured if we were wrong, we’d at least all be wrong together.
That train took me to the small Austrian town of Wörgl, where I had 45 minutes to enjoy a wonderful kebab sandwich and walk around just the little square area around train station, which was just enough time to realize that everything is cheaper outside of Paris and that if I had waited and just bought a winter coat there, I could have saved like 25 euro… but I’m very happy with my own new coat.
After Wörgl, I got my third and last train that took me to my final destination: Kirchberg in Tirol. There was no one waiting for me since I told them pretty last minute when I’d be getting, so I had to call my own cab (in German), which was an experience. I ended up sharing a cab with this other woman who had been on my train, and after we dropped her off I had to have the cab driver turn around and take me to an ATM because the cab ride was going to cost 16 euro!! By the time we eventually got to my hotel, I understood why it cost 16 euro… the hotel is halfway up a mountain, which is gorgeous, but a little treacherous to get to – icy hairpin turns kind of treacherous….
But I got in, took a wonderful nap and shower and then got to enjoy a dinner cooked for me with friends, so all of the travel was well worth it!
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