Today was a travel day! My route would take me from Barcelona-Sants (a train station here) to Lyon, France, where I would take a couple different trains spanning most of the day to get there.
I did have time for a quick breakfast at the closest cafe – one that was clearly themed for American tourists. Their food was a little pricier, but it was still delicious – the omelet and smoothie both, and the cortado I had was also tasty.
After that, it was a quick rush via the metro to my train station, where I arrived ~15 minutes early, then waited nervously for the sign to update and show me which platform to go to (mine was Cerbere).
We finally boarded the train and I was on my way!
I discovered that taking photos was hard – first, the windows are somewhat dirty. Next, we are speeding along quite quickly – quite a bit faster than cars on freeways here go! Google says around 320 km/hr for high speed trains in France, which I think I was on (that’s about 199 MPH).
Lastly, I didn’t always get a window seat and sometimes that meant I didn’t want to be the one American tourist reaching over people to take a photo of the (for them, very normal) sights.
So – enjoy this small collection of blurry photos from the first leg of the trip 😛 (This is the Spanish countryside, we aren’t in France yet at this point.)
As I rode this trip, I noticed another english-speaking tourist about my age sitting across the isle from me. He was reading a book about the social history of artificial intelligence and took out a film camera to shoot a few pictures out the window, so figuring I’d get along with him I struck up a conversation towards the end of the trip.
Sam is from London, and is on a little several-week trip of his own via train around Europe. He was also on the next train I was on, so we decided to sit together (I sweetened the deal with the promise of Uno).
While changing trains, we also met Laila, who’s been studying abroad in Madrid since January, and is from California! They were happy to join our little crew for Uno, so we found a booth with a table on the next train and played Uno, talked about public transit in the States VS in Europe (Europe wins by a landslide), our travel experiences, and our future plans and hopes for work (none of us want to find ourselves locked into a corporate job that keeps us there because it pays well, but also, money is important for quality of life . . . )
Laila also taught me how to say “Parles-tu anglais?” (Do you speak english?) – something that has become extremely useful in the last 24 hours, and also a majority of my French vocabulary (aside from “Oui” (yes) “Non” (no) and “Merci” (thank you)).
At the next station, we all had different trains, but we exchanged WhatsApp contact information, and I got a selfie of us all before we parted ways.
I had about an hour before my connecting train arrived, so I wandered around Narbonne (the town we stopped in) and found someplace to grab lunch. The waitress’s answer to “Parles-tu anglais?” was a quick “non” – so I fumbled through Google translate and showing her my phone’s screen until she procured a simple baguette ham sandwich and an orange juice for 6,85 euro. I think by the end we were both relieved to have survived the interaction!
The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. I did not have a window seat so I wasn’t able to grab a lot of pictures – but I did snap this one of the golden-hour countryside through the water spot stained window.
Lastly, there was this really cute little dog on the train. I really wanted to pet it, but I wasn’t sure if that would be ok.
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