Well, I guess “Training Solo” would be a more accurate title, but that just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Either way you look at it, I’m traveling alone through Europe, and I’m more than a little apprehensive about it. As I write, I’m on a train between Saarbrücken and Mannheim, Germany. I just had a rather confusing switch from a French TGV to a German IC train that no one knew we were going to have to make…
… and that’s where I stopped writing for awhile on train 1.5 of my solo travel adventure and started freaking out because I simultaneously realized two things:
1. My train was 16 minutes late because of the strange switch we’d had to make.
2. I only had a 19-minute layover at my next station.
Needless to say, this caused some mild consternation on my part. For the next 40 minutes or so I was frantically flipping through my rail timetable seeing if there was any possible way that I could make it to Cologne in time for my night train if I missed my connection in Mannheim. (There wasn’t). So my game plan was basically just pray that I made it in time, which fortunately ended up working out – ah, the power of prayer. Anyone remember the “ah, the power of cheese” commercials? Because that’s definitely what I was channeling right there… At any rate, I made it, but only barely. I, along with nearly all of the other passengers on my delayed train sprinted off the train as soon as the doors would open at Mannheim, which incidentally, is before the train actually comes to a complete stop. My cell phone said it was 20:35, which was when my train was supposed to leave, but, encouraged by the fact that they had still announced my train as one of the connections, I decided to sprint for platform 8 and see if I could make it. Turns out this train was also slightly delayed, but only by about 5 minutes, so it was basically getting ready to leave by the time I got there. I frantically tried to figure out which car I was in because for one of the first times in my train travels, the cars did not all connect and I needed to make sure I at least got on the correct half of the train. So after frantically gesturing between my ticket with the car number and the train to several train attendants on the platform, one of the pointed me all the way down to the far end of the train. Of course. After some more sprinting, I finally arrived in my car. I was surrounded by a rather loud group of Australian schoolchildren, but really didn’t mind because I made it!
(On a side note, if I didn’t make it, I was looking at other night train options from Frankfurt, so I almost ended up in Milan, from where I probably would have gone to see my friend Maria in Bologna, so I was momentarily ok with missing my train… and then I realized that that night train was probably already fully booked, at which point my panic recommenced.)
My switch at Köln went smoothly, but that was my first experience with a couchette car on a night train, so let me describe it for you. Each couchette compartment is about 6 feet long, 4.5 feet wide, and 9 feet high. There’s a middle pathway about 1.5 feet wide and two sets of three beds stacked on top of each other on either side. So for those of you keeping track at home, that’s a total of 243 cubic feet in the compartment, which once you subtract the middle pathway space, comes out to about 27 cubic feet per person. Each person gets about 18 cubic feet to sleep in – good luck if you’re over 6 feet tall. According to my calculations, hat leaves 9 cubic feet per person for luggage. On my first night train, this last part caused some struggles. By the time I got on the train at Köln, there were already 3 people in my car, and all of the beds were pulled out. (Before people start sleeping, the second bed is folded down to be a seat back so that everyone can sit on the bottom bed). My bed was the bottom one on the left side. Directly above me was an older woman who was already in bed/ready to sleep. Above her was another twenty-something girl who also got on at Köln. The bed across from me was still empty, the middle bed was occupied by another girl my age (Swedish, but spoke very good English), and the top bed belonged to a man that I literally think I saw twice during the 12 hours I was on the train.
Unfortunately the bed across from me did not stay unoccupied for too long. Shortly, we were joined by another middle-aged woman. This woman was, well, interesting. For one thing, she was the one who probably struggled the most with the approximately 9 cubic feet of luggage space we each had. To be fair, she got on last, so most of the easily accessible luggage space had already been claimed, but she came in with one very large suitcase and then at least four plastic bags full of who knows what. Not finding anywhere to put her suitcase, she put it in the hallway of the train, which she was told she could not do. This upset her. Then she realized she didn’t have a pillow. This also upset her. The door to our compartment was difficult to close. This upset her as well. This woman was just generally upset for the entire journey, constantly huffing and sighing about something or jabbering angrily in what I am now guessing was probably Serbian, but I actually have no idea. My guess of Serbian is based on the fact that when we had our passports checked in the middle of the night at the Danish border, she identified herself as from “Yugoslavia”. I’m still fairly baffled by that one, because I’m pretty sure she couldn’t still have a Yugoslavian passport… seeing as it hasn’t been a country for at least 18 years or so….
Other than that, the ride was pretty uneventful. I got a decent amount of sleep – definitely more than I got on the night trains I took where I just had a seat. So I arrived in København around 10:30 AM, fairly well rested. Oh wait, there was another “event” on my night train journey – in the morning, I’m pretty sure a girl set off the train’s fire alarm by straightening her hair in one of the washrooms. We never discovered for sure the source or reason of the piercing siren that starting screeching through our train car, but we decided not to be too concerned by it, because, you know, alarms rarely signal catastrophe or anything actually serious.
Where was I? Right, København! Well, right before heading to the train station in Paris, I printed out a google map with directions to my hostel from the train station. The hostel itself gave directions on its website, but those involved taking a bus which I would 1. Have to find and 2. Have to pay for. Therefore, I went with the walking option, which google informed me would only take 26 minutes – not too bad. (Granted, google also informed me that those directions might direct me to streets that didn’t have pedestrian walkways…). But it worked out just fine. I kind of dawdled on my way because I wasn’t sure what time I would be allowed to check into the hostel and definitely didn’t want to get all the way out there and then not be able to actually check in. So I poked around a little park and hung out on one of the canals for a bit. Yes, I literally hung out on the canal because it was frozen solid and there were other people walking and skating on it, so I figured it was pretty safe for me to do the same.
I got to my hostel, had no problem checking in, then spent some time to organize my stuff in a locker, eat some lunch, and use the wifi to let people know that I made it safely and with all of my valuables, despite not being able to lock my bag to a luggage rack, which, as my mother has recently advised me, is what The Esteemed Rick Steves does when he travels by rail. (Please don’t think I’m making light of securing your valuables on trains – this is indeed very important and requires due vigilance, I’m merely poking a little fun at 1. My family’s mildly absurd faith in anything said by Rick Steves and 2. The fact that my mother decided to give me this advice on train safety after I had already taken approximately 25 trains over the course of three weeks.)
My hostel was called “Sleep in Heaven” and was a pretty good hostel all things considered. It was kind of far away from the historic area/city center and they charge you extra for sheets and breakfast, but I have no problem navigating my way into town and I planned ahead and brought my own sheets (a sleeping bag liner actually – a last-minute purchase in the States that turned out to be worth the investment) and food for breakfast. They also had free internet – two computers and wifi. The room I was in had three-tiered bunk beds, which one online review had said were confusing, but after the three-tiered beds in the cramped sleeping car, this was no problem at all for me.
So in the early afternoon I set out to do at least part of one of the walking tours plotted out on the map of Copenhagen I had gotten from the hostel. Highlights (see pictures for details): the grave of Hans Christian Andersen, the Round Tower (oldest still functioning observatory in Europe), the first of three royal residences, a national museum, another park, the Kastellet (fort), the Little Mermaid statue, the Marble Church, and the second of three royal residences. I got to this last one around 4:00pm and it was already almost completely dark, so I wandered around some of the main shopping streets, bought a loaf of bread and then got back to the hostel to figure out some of my plans for Spain next week.
Saturday morning I took an early(ish) train across the Oresund Bridge from Kobenhavn to Malmö, Sweden. Definitely worth it to be able to say I’ve been to Sweden. There was a decent amount of stuff to see in Malmö, but it was freezing and my camera battery died halfway through, so I ended up spending a grand total of about 2 hours in Sweden. But it still counts – especially since I saw an IKEA from the train, which really just encapsulates the essence of Sweden. Again, see photo captions for more details on Malmö.
So I got back to Kobenhavn around 12:30, went directly back to my hostel to charge my camera battery and charge my own “battery” with a cup (ok, two cups) of coffee. So by the time I was headed out again I knew I only had about 2 ½ more hours of daylight to take advantage of, so to be able to walk as quickly as possible and not have to back track to the hostel, I ditched my pack in a locker at the train station.
Highlight of the afternoon: the Danish Museum, not the one I had passed before, but a different one, which was free! It had some great exhibits on Danish history and a special exhibit on climate (surprise, surprise), was really cool because they had things like ice core samples seeing as most of those are from the Greenland ice shelf and Denmark owns Greenland. See photos for fun historical facts.
Lowlight of the afternoon: all of the churches I tried to go to were closed by 3pm. What kinds of churches close at 3 pm?
However, with the last of my Danish kroner and my final hours in Copenhagen, I fulfilled two life goals: 1. Owning a hat with ear flaps and 2. Eating a Danish danish in Denmark. Life is good.
… and that’s where I stopped writing for awhile on train 1.5 of my solo travel adventure and started freaking out because I simultaneously realized two things:
1. My train was 16 minutes late because of the strange switch we’d had to make.
2. I only had a 19-minute layover at my next station.
Needless to say, this caused some mild consternation on my part. For the next 40 minutes or so I was frantically flipping through my rail timetable seeing if there was any possible way that I could make it to Cologne in time for my night train if I missed my connection in Mannheim. (There wasn’t). So my game plan was basically just pray that I made it in time, which fortunately ended up working out – ah, the power of prayer. Anyone remember the “ah, the power of cheese” commercials? Because that’s definitely what I was channeling right there… At any rate, I made it, but only barely. I, along with nearly all of the other passengers on my delayed train sprinted off the train as soon as the doors would open at Mannheim, which incidentally, is before the train actually comes to a complete stop. My cell phone said it was 20:35, which was when my train was supposed to leave, but, encouraged by the fact that they had still announced my train as one of the connections, I decided to sprint for platform 8 and see if I could make it. Turns out this train was also slightly delayed, but only by about 5 minutes, so it was basically getting ready to leave by the time I got there. I frantically tried to figure out which car I was in because for one of the first times in my train travels, the cars did not all connect and I needed to make sure I at least got on the correct half of the train. So after frantically gesturing between my ticket with the car number and the train to several train attendants on the platform, one of the pointed me all the way down to the far end of the train. Of course. After some more sprinting, I finally arrived in my car. I was surrounded by a rather loud group of Australian schoolchildren, but really didn’t mind because I made it!
(On a side note, if I didn’t make it, I was looking at other night train options from Frankfurt, so I almost ended up in Milan, from where I probably would have gone to see my friend Maria in Bologna, so I was momentarily ok with missing my train… and then I realized that that night train was probably already fully booked, at which point my panic recommenced.)
My switch at Köln went smoothly, but that was my first experience with a couchette car on a night train, so let me describe it for you. Each couchette compartment is about 6 feet long, 4.5 feet wide, and 9 feet high. There’s a middle pathway about 1.5 feet wide and two sets of three beds stacked on top of each other on either side. So for those of you keeping track at home, that’s a total of 243 cubic feet in the compartment, which once you subtract the middle pathway space, comes out to about 27 cubic feet per person. Each person gets about 18 cubic feet to sleep in – good luck if you’re over 6 feet tall. According to my calculations, hat leaves 9 cubic feet per person for luggage. On my first night train, this last part caused some struggles. By the time I got on the train at Köln, there were already 3 people in my car, and all of the beds were pulled out. (Before people start sleeping, the second bed is folded down to be a seat back so that everyone can sit on the bottom bed). My bed was the bottom one on the left side. Directly above me was an older woman who was already in bed/ready to sleep. Above her was another twenty-something girl who also got on at Köln. The bed across from me was still empty, the middle bed was occupied by another girl my age (Swedish, but spoke very good English), and the top bed belonged to a man that I literally think I saw twice during the 12 hours I was on the train.
Unfortunately the bed across from me did not stay unoccupied for too long. Shortly, we were joined by another middle-aged woman. This woman was, well, interesting. For one thing, she was the one who probably struggled the most with the approximately 9 cubic feet of luggage space we each had. To be fair, she got on last, so most of the easily accessible luggage space had already been claimed, but she came in with one very large suitcase and then at least four plastic bags full of who knows what. Not finding anywhere to put her suitcase, she put it in the hallway of the train, which she was told she could not do. This upset her. Then she realized she didn’t have a pillow. This also upset her. The door to our compartment was difficult to close. This upset her as well. This woman was just generally upset for the entire journey, constantly huffing and sighing about something or jabbering angrily in what I am now guessing was probably Serbian, but I actually have no idea. My guess of Serbian is based on the fact that when we had our passports checked in the middle of the night at the Danish border, she identified herself as from “Yugoslavia”. I’m still fairly baffled by that one, because I’m pretty sure she couldn’t still have a Yugoslavian passport… seeing as it hasn’t been a country for at least 18 years or so….
Other than that, the ride was pretty uneventful. I got a decent amount of sleep – definitely more than I got on the night trains I took where I just had a seat. So I arrived in København around 10:30 AM, fairly well rested. Oh wait, there was another “event” on my night train journey – in the morning, I’m pretty sure a girl set off the train’s fire alarm by straightening her hair in one of the washrooms. We never discovered for sure the source or reason of the piercing siren that starting screeching through our train car, but we decided not to be too concerned by it, because, you know, alarms rarely signal catastrophe or anything actually serious.
Where was I? Right, København! Well, right before heading to the train station in Paris, I printed out a google map with directions to my hostel from the train station. The hostel itself gave directions on its website, but those involved taking a bus which I would 1. Have to find and 2. Have to pay for. Therefore, I went with the walking option, which google informed me would only take 26 minutes – not too bad. (Granted, google also informed me that those directions might direct me to streets that didn’t have pedestrian walkways…). But it worked out just fine. I kind of dawdled on my way because I wasn’t sure what time I would be allowed to check into the hostel and definitely didn’t want to get all the way out there and then not be able to actually check in. So I poked around a little park and hung out on one of the canals for a bit. Yes, I literally hung out on the canal because it was frozen solid and there were other people walking and skating on it, so I figured it was pretty safe for me to do the same.
I got to my hostel, had no problem checking in, then spent some time to organize my stuff in a locker, eat some lunch, and use the wifi to let people know that I made it safely and with all of my valuables, despite not being able to lock my bag to a luggage rack, which, as my mother has recently advised me, is what The Esteemed Rick Steves does when he travels by rail. (Please don’t think I’m making light of securing your valuables on trains – this is indeed very important and requires due vigilance, I’m merely poking a little fun at 1. My family’s mildly absurd faith in anything said by Rick Steves and 2. The fact that my mother decided to give me this advice on train safety after I had already taken approximately 25 trains over the course of three weeks.)
My hostel was called “Sleep in Heaven” and was a pretty good hostel all things considered. It was kind of far away from the historic area/city center and they charge you extra for sheets and breakfast, but I have no problem navigating my way into town and I planned ahead and brought my own sheets (a sleeping bag liner actually – a last-minute purchase in the States that turned out to be worth the investment) and food for breakfast. They also had free internet – two computers and wifi. The room I was in had three-tiered bunk beds, which one online review had said were confusing, but after the three-tiered beds in the cramped sleeping car, this was no problem at all for me.
So in the early afternoon I set out to do at least part of one of the walking tours plotted out on the map of Copenhagen I had gotten from the hostel. Highlights (see pictures for details): the grave of Hans Christian Andersen, the Round Tower (oldest still functioning observatory in Europe), the first of three royal residences, a national museum, another park, the Kastellet (fort), the Little Mermaid statue, the Marble Church, and the second of three royal residences. I got to this last one around 4:00pm and it was already almost completely dark, so I wandered around some of the main shopping streets, bought a loaf of bread and then got back to the hostel to figure out some of my plans for Spain next week.
Saturday morning I took an early(ish) train across the Oresund Bridge from Kobenhavn to Malmö, Sweden. Definitely worth it to be able to say I’ve been to Sweden. There was a decent amount of stuff to see in Malmö, but it was freezing and my camera battery died halfway through, so I ended up spending a grand total of about 2 hours in Sweden. But it still counts – especially since I saw an IKEA from the train, which really just encapsulates the essence of Sweden. Again, see photo captions for more details on Malmö.
So I got back to Kobenhavn around 12:30, went directly back to my hostel to charge my camera battery and charge my own “battery” with a cup (ok, two cups) of coffee. So by the time I was headed out again I knew I only had about 2 ½ more hours of daylight to take advantage of, so to be able to walk as quickly as possible and not have to back track to the hostel, I ditched my pack in a locker at the train station.
Highlight of the afternoon: the Danish Museum, not the one I had passed before, but a different one, which was free! It had some great exhibits on Danish history and a special exhibit on climate (surprise, surprise), was really cool because they had things like ice core samples seeing as most of those are from the Greenland ice shelf and Denmark owns Greenland. See photos for fun historical facts.
Lowlight of the afternoon: all of the churches I tried to go to were closed by 3pm. What kinds of churches close at 3 pm?
However, with the last of my Danish kroner and my final hours in Copenhagen, I fulfilled two life goals: 1. Owning a hat with ear flaps and 2. Eating a Danish danish in Denmark. Life is good.
[In case the link snuck past you earlier, click here for the rest of my Denmark and Sweden photo album]
i'm really proud of you for navigating denmark on your own! also, i can't believe you've lived in the midwest for practically your whole life and you haven't owned a hat with earflaps (!!!)
ReplyDeletein other news. i still have two. weeks. left. should be plenty of time to learn the essentials in czech (i already know how to count to 10, say hello/good night (goodbye is like 17 syllables), and i can also say "i don't understand" which will probably be useful...).
Boo for not visiting Maria in Bologna... still waiting!
ReplyDeleteWhat an amazing series of adventures, though!