Ride on the Austrian Express

Hey guys! I'm back from my trip to Austria and Germany. It was amazing. The best part was, I got to travel with my mom. She visited me for a weekend in Switzerland and then we took the trip together. It was so good to see her again.
Today's post is about our train ride to Austria. I hope it gives anyone who hasn't traveled via train in Europe a sense of what the experience is like. Enjoy! (I'm back to posting regularly, so look for my posts every Monday and Thursday.) 

THE JOURNEY

-The first step? Buy breakfast! 

My mom and I had to get to the Zurich main train station (Hauptbahnhof) by 8:30 am. Which meant I had to get up at 7. 7-freaking-am. I am not a morning person. Really, really, really not. So I wasn't super conscious for the first few hours of our journey. I do remember that we had no time for breakfast so we bought chocolate croissants at a pastry shop at the train station. (I had to wait outside of the store with our mountain of luggage while my mom bought the food and I tried to avoid eye contact with the homeless man wandering around muttering to himself and approaching random people.) The croissants were amazing!!!!! They were filled with chocolate pudding, something I've never experienced before, and I practically moaned when I ate it.

- Beyond Exhausted
As I said, I was barely conscious during the beginning of the train ride. I wanted to sleep, so badly, but I couldn't because I can never fall asleep when I'm vertical (as I said before on my first blog post about my plane ride to Europe.) After adjusting myself multiple times in my seat, getting up to pee about five times (every single time right as I was getting drowsy), and getting more and more frustrated that I couldn't fall asleep, I somehow knocked off around 9 am and slept for two hours.

-Problems 

Overall, we had great luck with the trip. It's always a tricky business making sure that connections are caught. A lot of times on train trips, I'm waiting for about 40 minutes on a dirty concrete platform trying to avoid anyone who looks a bit dangerous and dying from the weight of my backpack. We were lucky that we caught all of our connections and found our seats with little problem. We did have one crisis. As my mom was working on her laptop, it decided to crash. That was a rough spot, as my mom freaked out that she wouldn't have her laptop for work and we tried to figure out what we could do. (Thankfully, we were able to figure out the problem later that night in the hotel.)


-Overall
The train journey was overall positive. The scenery, traveling from Switzerland to Austria, is beautiful. We always drove past mountains, and I saw snow!!! That's the first time I ever remember seeing snow. There were A LOT of people on the train, but that was fine because we had reserved seats. The ride took all day and we finally arrived at our destination at 6 pm. A colleague of my mom picked us up from the train station and drove us to our hotel. Our room was beautiful. It looked like lumberjack barbie's home, with wood surfaces, pink curtains, cream-colored leather seats, and a giant picture of a lily. We took a quick stroll through a nearby forest and stopped by the grocery store across the street for snacks and quick supplies. We then had dinner at the hotel's restaurant and then went to bed early because we were exhausted.

Tips for Train Travel (German and Austrian): 

1. Get a seat reservation to reduce stress.
2. Try to book a train ticket that has a good amount of time between connections to have sufficient time to get the next train in case there are delays (there will most likely always be a delay.)
3. There is no limit to how much you bring on a train but you have to be able to carry it and stow it away. Try to limit yourself to a backpack and carry-on. For larger cases, you can usually store it in a luggage storage compartment found on IC and ICE trains.
4. ICE is the most comfortable way to travel long distance. The trains are the fastest so you have less travel time, the most space, seats are comfortable, and it's often the cleanest. The bathrooms also look nice and the floors are carpeted.
5. Always have a ticket. The train controller comes by continually and you will be in huge trouble if you don't have one.
6. As a foreigner, you can usually find someone who is willing to help you figure out your connections. If your fellow passenger doesn't know English, the ticket controller or restaurant employees do and are willing to help you.
7. IC and ICE trains have an on-board restaurant where you can buy food and drinks, usually for affordable prices. Just follow the signs on the train to find where it is.
8. The bathrooms either have liquid soap or soap in powdered form. In the latter case, you'll see a star-shaped knob above the sink. Turn it until powder comes out and then run water over it. It will liquidize and become soap.
9. Bring a book, laptop, phone, headphones, whatever. Just bring something for entertainment because a five-hour ride can be super boring if you have nothing to do.
10. Enjoy!