I cannot take credit for the originality of the title: all hail to Ashlee, except the part about the pants. The pants are my rhyming addition and I’m going to just assume that all the pants we see in Germany are indeed German pants.
Today we got up at extremely early o’clock to head to Munich, with a quick stopover in Paris for lunch and seeing some Parisian stuff (just Notre Dame, croissants, and Orangina). The sun was coming up as our train pulled out of London St Pancras (which my phone forever calls Pancreas), and we trained through rolling British countryside and the Chunnel before arriving in France. There were loads of hot air balloons in the air just south of Calais!
More importantly, we thoroughly skunked the boys at cribbage, in a 6-0 victory between London and Paris. The Great Eurostar Skunking of 2018 is complete! We will forever hold this victory over them.
My train seat advertised itself on the window as being a seat with a view, but the windows were pretty dirty so it was hard to get any decent pictures. France just looks like Wisconsin with different cows, so picture that but with some tall trees between fields and you’ve got northern France.
We arrived in Paris and stored our luggage at our departing station so we could venture out to Notre Dame. The Parisian metro ticketing system sucks as the gate rejected our newly-purchased tickets and people would just jump the gates. Also, Paris just smells like pee. A lot of pee.
Despite its stone-age metro and pungent piss smell, it is an incredibly beautiful city. French gothic architecture was everywhere around the stations (Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est). We headed over to Notre Dame and considered going inside, but the line was ten thousand years long and we had places to be and pee to smell on our way to those places. We walked around the outside for a bit, taking in the buttresses (flying) and gargoyles (not alive but extremely cool).
There were no hunchbacks to be found anywhere, but we did find a bunch of people willingly covering themselves in pigeons for pictures.
We also wandered around on the little island a bit, finding France’s oldest cafe which was covered in wisteria (possibly it was just sentient wisteria) and streets with cute views of other French gothic buildings that were so cute you could barf a little.
After we blitzed through Notre Dame, we went back to the station and began our trek to Stuttgart and then Munich. We had first class tickets on the TGV, so our car was quiet and comfy and we had a Mario Party in which I was the glorious victor. The TGV travels at about 300+kph (~190 mph) through the rolling French countryside and into the mountains around Bavaria.
We arrived in Munich after dark and after thoroughly and impressively locking ourselves out of our Air B&B in typical fashion, we set off for a very late dinner at a nearby restaurant. Tomorrow, we’ll ride bikes around Munich and try not to die!
