Up and at 'em!

Timeframe: Nov 22, 2008

You know, it never ceases to amaze me how early 5 am is. I figured I had to leave that early though because the train is supposed to leave at 6:30 or 7:00 (two different trains) and Kevin said I should try and be there 40 minutes early since I didn't have a ticket yet.

Well, I got to the gare on time (6:20), but it turns out the earliest train is really at 7:30. Oh well, I didn't need an extra hour of sleep anyway :) Besides, the pigeons in the train station kept me company. I had a picture of the pigeons, but it turned out way too dark. They look just like American pigeons anyway, same size and everything.

The TGV didn't strike me as fancy as I had imagined it. I thought the train was going to be some mag-lev super-speedy train, but it turns out it's just a normal train that didn't seem to go all that fast. Although, the only experience I have with trains were the ones they used in Bulgaria and this one was much newer and nicer. The rails were also considerably smoother, so they didn't make that repeating sound everytime you hit a new section of rail (I can't explain, but if you've been to Bulgaria you'll know what I mean).

An odd thing happened as we got closer to Paris and started going through many tunnels. On many of the tunnels (maybe all of them, I'm not sure) the pressure changed and I had to yawn to fix it, just like on an airplane. It happened a bunch of times even though we weren't changing elevation. Kevin's guess is that due to the speed of the train and the narrowness of the tunnels that perhaps the train is compressed a little, compressing the air inside.

Most of the ride had nice pastoral views of France, but as we got closer to Paris it got much grungier. I've since been told the suburbs just outside of Paris are one of the dirtiest places in the country, so that's probably what I noticed. There were lots of nice towns spread throughout the countryside, even a few picturesque farms with smoke rising from the chimney early on a Saturday morning. Either I'm too absorbed by the view, busy reading books, or I don't think that pictures through windows work very well. Pick one of those excuses that you like best and pretend that I used it to explain why I never seem to take pictures from moving vehicles.