Monday, June 17
We'd sleep a little, then wake up a little and try to readjust in those tiny seats. When we booked this train, i'd been promised seats that would recline – a promise that was full of lies, like when you expect a bacon-wrapped pretzel but it turns out to be a turkey bacon-wrapped turd. There were walls behind every seat, so we were organized into little six-person rooms. This is so unideal for sleeping that i just want to find whoever came up with the idea of using these cars for overnights and stick them in one with five screaming children in diapers and not let them out for a year. There were at least two separate times when we woke up in the night and the train was not moving. The first time we were clearly in a station, the second i couldn't see anything so i got up to use the bathroom and to try and find out where we were. The answer was the middle of fucking nowhere. I couldn't find anybody else awake on the train, much less someone wearing a uniform, to give me an explanation.
We ended up pulling into our station twenty minutes late, just after 4am, missing our connecting train and stranding us at a dead hub. By that i mean that the tourism center, the help desk, all the shops...anybody who could have given us any kind of assistance, was closed.
Using the Eurail Trip-Planning App on my phone, we figured the next available train to Munich on our own. It was over an hour away, so we went up to the platform where it would be pulling in, set a blanket on the concrete, and passed out, cell phone in hand with an alarm set. We slept more comfortably there than we had on the train.
According to the trip planner, this train required no reservation. It didn't even say that a reservation was recommended, or even optional. As far as we could tell, no reservation was needed or possible for this train at all.
We boarded the First-Class car, which was nearly empty, and every seat said “Reserviert” above it. So we made the decision that we'd select a couple anyway, and if somebody came up to us with their tickets in hand and asked for their seats, we'd give them up. We've done this and seen this done several times during our vacation, including finding someone else in our seats and asking them to move, which they did without complaint. It seems a pretty normal thing.
Asleep for most of that train ride, we didn't notice that the car was filling in. I awoke much later and noticed this, and wondered at how we'd randomly selected seats which were not claimed by any of the people now populating most of the car. The ticket-checking man had come through and accepted our Eurail pass without a voucher for reservation, so we seemed to be ok.
Then, at one stop, i happened to still be awake, and two people boarded the train looking for seats in First-Class, a teenage boy and obviously his mother. When they found all the seats full, they stood in the area outside of the compartment, where the doors to the outside and the bathrooms are. I could hear the mother shouting angrily in German, and that's when i realized that the reservations for this car were not specific by seat, just general reservations to have a seat guaranteed to you. We were indeed taking someone's spot.
This weighed heavily on my moral compass. What do i do in this situation? We were getting off at the next stop anyway, so they'd be able to move into our vacant seats there. The next stop was over twenty minutes away. I didn't even know if they could speak English, if i went up and offered them our seats and had us stand outside the compartment. But i was still sour over the train system leaving us stranded at 4am because our train came in late, after stopping inexplicably in the middle of nowhere for long stretches of time; clearly the whole incident is still their fault. When the ticket man came back through and they complained to him, i thought for sure he was going to root us out and we'd be in some kind of trouble, possibly legal, but he went through the train and checked tickets on anybody he hadn't already gotten, skipping over us entirely.
In the end, i decided to keep my mouth shut. The way i see it, there were two options: say something, and possibly get us in serious trouble; or say nothing, and everybody still gets to their destinations and goes on with their lives, and these two probably end up getting something nice from the rail company for free. Opting for the latter seemed the better way to go.
This put us in Munich closer to 8am than 6am, as we had originally expected. Maybe it worked out better that way; i don't know what we would have done in Munich at 6am, although i guess we could have explored the city, probably found the Olympic grounds from the 70s. You know, the ones they made the movie about.
Amanda's biggest plan for Munich was to see the castles, though. Munich is supposed to have three very impressive, very old castles. So after shoving all of our belongings into a locker for the day, we struck out to find the tourism office.
It was still closed.
Once it opened, we got in line (oh, there were plenty of other people already waiting outside by the time we got there), and finally asked about going to the castles, but not as a tour group. The man at the counter told us that two of them are located in a small town just outside of Munich called Fuessen, which we could hop a train to with our Eurail passes and then take a shuttle bus from the train station. That sounded pretty alright to us, so it's what we did.
The train ride to Fuessen was two hours. Just outside of Munich, my ass. 104 kilometers. And when we got there, around 12:30, we were informed that you cannot go into the castles without a tour group, and the next English tour leaves at 4:00pm, or we could take a German tour at 2:30.
What? What the hell? Why are we even in your podunk little town at 12:30 if we cannot tour your stupid castles, the only reason anybody comes to your backwoods villa, until 2 freaking 30?! And since our train to Venice got bumped up to 6:30 instead of 11:30pm, and needing two [unintelligible swearing] hours to get back to Munich to get on that train, we would be unable to wait around until even 2:30, much less 4:00, to take a tour of indeterminate length.
Well, we had traveled all the way out here, so we may as well do some sightseeing. We took the mountain path up to one castle, Castle Neuschwanstein, just to see the outside, and to get the view of the countryside from its dizzying altitude.
The path up the mountain was a consistent slope, paved smoothly so that horse-drawn carriages could ascend it. We were keeping pace just behind one for a while, honestly going the same speed and dodging horse apples with ease.
The outside of the castle was pretty impressive on its own. I had to wonder how the hell they got all of the materials up here to build the damn thing, since it was constructed before modern conveniences. I'll have to guess slave labor, but even given that, this is impressive. I'm not sure how high up we were, but i'll bet someone knows the answer (i'm talking about Wikipedia). I'd look these things up myself if i had access to the internet. Going on 48 hours without now...
Returning to Munich, we mostly hung around in the train station, since there was only an hour until our train came in. We went to book one of our trains for next week well in advance, since we didn't want to get screwed again like we did last night and are getting screwed again tonight. We've been given a lot of conflicting information on when and if you're supposed to book reservations, how much it's going to cost (you know, ABOVE the $700 each we already paid for our train passes), and the amenities available to us on these trains, and it's really pissing us off. Amanda even more so than me, she's been what i would describe as “livid” a few times in the past couple days.
All of our trains are now booked ahead except for the ones we are taking in Greece. Greece is experiencing some kind of workers' strike on the railroads and international train service has been suspended indefinitely, but their domestic lines are supposedly still working. We asked if we could make reservations on our Greek trains from the desk in Munich, and the woman we were working with – who, i might add, had an American accent, making her the easiest professional-type person we've had to deal with yet to understand – didn't know. She asked one of her co-workers if we could book trains in Greece, and he replied, “Greece doesn't exist.”
Well, i guess that solved that one. We will have to book them when we get there.
Hope we don't get screwed again!
Ugh. So anyway, that brings us up to now, i'm finally caught up on my log for the first time in a few days. It's only 8:30 right now, but i should really get some sleep, because this is now our night train. We've got a layover in Villach, Austria, to look forward to, getting off of this train at 10:45 and boarding the next at midnight, and then arriving in Venice somewhere in the neighborhood of 3am. I'm hoping the Venice train station has a lounge, like the Munich one did, so that we can get some rest there and not have to venture around Venice in the wee hours. Whether they do or not, i'm pretty sure we won't be leaving the train station before the sun comes up.
I'm hot, dirty, and agitated, somewhere in Austria, and i'm going to call it a day. Really looking forward to checking in to our hotel or hostel, i don't remember which, tomorrow and taking a shower, because we haven't had one since the night we reached Mulhouse. Other than switching out my shirt this morning for a fresh one, i haven't even taken my clothes off since yesterday morning. I guess it's not as long as it feels like, but we're both pretty rank and my hair is starting to look like a less well-manicured Hugh Jackman in X-Men.
Here's to seeing the internet tomorrow, probably.
UPDATE: Pretty sure we just passed a giant warehouse called XXX Lulz.
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