& we are off: the overnight train to Vienna

Wednesday night we packed our bags and waited for Josh to get off work-he had gotten stuck at work and was late getting home, but we eventually headed out to dinner and met up with a lot of Josh's friends for dinner. They were all nice and Joseph and I ended up sitting across from Laura and Will who were also going to Vienna, so we talked to them during dinner. Laura lived in Germany in high school, so she speaks fluent German which makes us all pretty jealous. And Will is from the north east and went to UMass Amherst, outside Boston where I went to college so it was nice to east coast talk with someone (I do miss the east coast!).

Since the train from Frankfurt is 8 hours, we had opted to take an overnight train - taking a day train for that long seems like a little bit of a waste of a day. So our train left Wiesbaden at 10:30 and we changed trains in Frankfurt, but eventually all six of us were settled in our little train car. It was somewhat crowded but luckily I am pretty good about sleeping in awkward small spaces so I was able to sleep for a few hours. The seats lay flat, so if you lay two across from each other down you have a kind of bed, Josh figured that out about four hours in, so we were pretty comfortable. But Laura ended up sleeping under the seats laying on the ground, which she said was comfortable (but I have my doubts!).

We spent at lot of time laughing and talking instead of sleeping, but once we had pulled out Josh's undergrad senior thesis on Batman, that was pretty inevitable... The paper is good but when read deadpanned at 2am, it's basically hilarious.

All and all overnight train travel was pretty nice and there is no denying that train stations are way nicer and more relaxed then airports, so I was a pretty big fan. We got into Vienna at 9am, which was slightly awesome except that we were all exhausted. So we spent the day shopping for clothes that people needed for the weekend (shoes, dresses, suits) and then crashed big time at 2pm, when we could check into our room at the hotels.

Here are the only pictures I took the first day, but I think they show how tired we are, so i thought I would share: