A hell of a ride
Ok it was our fault we missed the first train from Gent. …but then it started: “No, you cannot use this ticket on the Thalys train” ..alright! So I asked for an upgrade to the Thalys – doesn’t work that way. So they wanted to charge me an additional amount of 40 EUR for a single way ticket from Brüssel to Köln. Unbelievable! Maybe the person behind the counter finally felt sorry for me traveling about 12 hours from Gent to Göttingen if I don’t get the ticket. Anyway she got me an “admission ticket” without claim on a seat for around 5 EUR. Fair enough – I was happy. Then we got on the train and arrived in Brüssel …just after the Thalys left. Right! Well, the thing about the Thalys is – your ticket is only valid for that particular train! (How stupid is that?!) So we needed to get our reservations changed. (At least that was possible!) Unfortunately that “fast” person behind the desk did not know about any train connections. So we needed to go somewhere else. Done – but what’s this for a machine? …I needed to take a ticket(!) and wait to be called. (I always thought German bureaucracy would be bad but that’s….) After a few minutes of waiting I got the new connection. Alright, we catched the Thalys a hour later. Too bad that we had a delay of 25 minutes when we arrived in Köln. So we hopped off in Köln instead of Köln-Deutz and catched the next train to Frankfurt. Which was also delayed when we arrived in Frankfurt. Anyway I said bye to the guys and got onto the next train to Göttingen. It was also delayed when I arrived at about 21:40 in Göttingen. But whatever – I was at home!
Gosh, sometimes I hate going by train!