Chapter 17 - Back to Germany

The return train journey to Saarbruecken
Saturday 2nd January 2010

Well, as regular readers of this blog will know, I'm not very good at updating punctually! So here, albeit a week late, is the story of my journey back to Saarbruecken. The good news is that it wasn't quite as eventful as the homeward journey. So, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride...

First off, I should make a mention to my sister whose birthday it was on the 2nd - annoying though it was to travel back on this date - it was better than travelling on Sunday where certain places' public transport is somewhat lacking on the day of rest! My train was due to leave Chippenham at 07.55, but because, as I found out later, the driver couldn't release the brakes at Bristol, the train left Chippenham at 08.12. This wasn't a problem in itself because I had 2 and a half hours in London to get from Paddington to St. Pancras International. The journey to London was relatively painless - we stayed about 15 minutes late, which was about as much as I'd hoped for!

Now it's worth pointing out that Transport for London (TfL) had decided that this weekend would be a good weekend to undertake some engineering works on some of the lines - i.e. the Circle Line and Hammersmith & City Lines in particular; which as Londoners will know are the two direct lines between the termini I wanted. Thus, I had to catch the Bakerloo line to Oxford Circus, and come back up to Kings Cross/St. Pancras on the Victoria line. This part of the journey was actually problem-free; although I did feel like I'd walked most of the way by the time I got out of the Tube station at St. Pancras.

Seeing as I like to turn up at somewhere in plenty of time; I made my first port of call the check-in hall for Eurostar; which was substantially easier to find than its Parisian counterpart. The first thing that struck me was how busy it was! There were hundreds of people in the check-in hall, and no real sense of what one was supposed to do. It turned out that check-in opened an hour before the train left, so seeing as I was there 90 minutes before my train left, I hid at the back of the hall and read my book, and then joined a queue exactly an hour before my train left - i.e. 10.32. The check-in seemed slightly chaotic, to be honest; everyone was queued up together irrespective of what train they were catching, and the people on earlier trains were then being lassooed out of the queue by Eurostar staff and ushered to the front. I did eventually get to the head of the queue where once you have put your ticket in the machine, you find you find yourself immediately thrown into the security zone. The first thing you have to do is take off coats, fleeces, scarves, gloves, hats. All these, along with your luggage, go through the X-Ray machine, while you walk through the Metal Detector. Now, despite wearing almost the same clothes back to Germany as I wore home, I didn't buzz as I went through! The next stage is the PAF (see last entry for explanation) who had a cursory glance at my passport. There were also UKBA officers loitering with intent around the terminal area. Once I'd got through all those I found a seat and waited for embarkation to commence at 11.12 (20 minutes before scheduled departure time) - however, embarkation was to be delayed because the train had arrived late. We were only delayed by about 12 minutes in actuality and left St. Pancras at 11.45.

The journey to Paris was OK, I read my book, ate my lunch, looked out the window, changed my watch and phone times. Some 2 hours 45 minutes later we pulled into Paris Gare du Nord. Prior to coming back, we'd arranged that we would meet up in Paris. Esther was on an earlier Eurostar than me, so met me at Gare du Nord, from where we walked to Paris Est and used the left luggage facility there, so as not to have to carry our suitcases all around Paris. Then we purchased a carnet of tickets for the public transport network in Paris. From Paris Est, we took the Metro to Louvre, which I'd only seen in Tricolore (for the young'uns reading this - it was the book that we used before Metro!) beforehand. From there we walked in a random direction across the Seine, from where we walked through the cultural heart of Paris - Saint Germain des Pres. Then we walked over to Notre Dame, and looked at it; we didn't go in because the queue was quite long. We then ambled past the Hotel de Ville (where the Mayor of Paris works - somewhat more architecturally pleasing than the Ghurkin in my opinion), before catching the Metro back to Paris Est where we waited and met up with Claire and Harriet who had flown into Charles de Gaulle.

After we'd met up, and Esther and I had retrieved our luggage, we headed off to board the train to Saarbruecken (or Sarrebruck as the French call it). The train left promptly but then because of the snow, the line through Lorraine (or Lothringen as the Germans call it) had had its speed reduced meaning that we would be about 15 minutes late into Saarbruecken. This would make the connection to the bus very tight, and indeed when we arrived into the Hauptbahnhof we had 3 or 4 minutes to get to the bus stop. Luckily the bus hadn't arrived when we got there, and we managed to get on the faithful 121 home. I eventually got in about 22.00 before realising that I also needed to make my bed and unpack quite a lot of stuff before I could go to bed!

So, in the next installment I'll be talking about the first week back in Germany...