The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men...

...Often go awry. Yes indeed they do. Yesterday, I set off for a day trip to Colmar with some other English assistants. Colmar, like the larger Strasbourg, is also located in the region of Alsace and known for its Christmas markets. For those not familiar with Alsace, it is located near the German border, and spent much of its history flip-flopping between France and Germany, thus a trip there is like traveling to Germany, but everyone still speaks French (apart from the many German tourists of course).

After a 4.5 hour train ride, we arrived in the Colmar, and stepped straight into the pages of Hansel and Gretel. Colorful, half-timbered buildings, snow-dusted Christmas trees, and a marchés de noël around every corner--add a few gum drops and you've got a veritable gingerbread village! Despite the cold and the Disneyland crowds, we shoved our way around the town and through the many Christmas markets, even managing to déguster (taste) some vin chaud (mulled or hot wine) and eventually find a restaurant that wasn't complet (full). After sitting at said restaurant for about 45 minutes waiting to order and then get our food, we devoured our meals in 10 minutes flat, already thorougly defrosted and anxious to finish winding our way through the markets before our 17h44 train. After wandering through the quartier of Petite Venise, lined with--what else--a canal, we made it through the last couple of markets (at one of which I bought a bag of thé à la noisette--hazelnut tea!), we numbly marched back to the train station, a little early for a our train, but in need of a second round of defrosting. Unfortuantely, as the sun had just set, we missed the town being lit up. Apparently, every night (during the holidays or no), the town is beautifully lit with different colored lights. Dommage.

Anyway, though we didn't yet know it, our real adventure had just begun. First, the train left 20 minutes late. Ok, no big deal, we would still be able to make our various buses, trams and metros. Well, the train gods had other plans in store for us. At about 20 till 11pm (after we'd already been traveling for 4.5 hours--we had stalled in a couple of other stations), the train just stopped en plein voie as they say, ie just in the middle of the tracks. We didn't fully understand the problem, because they used a couple of words we didn't know, but suffice it to say, because of the cold, stuff was frozen, and the train couldn't go any farther. We were about an hour outside Lyon (probably about 30 min on the train). Super. Next announcement: if we don't move in 40 minutes, they'll send buses. What?? Why do we have to wait 40 minutes? What is that going to solve?? It's not getting any warmer out there! So for about 2.5 hours, we boiled inside the train (luckily we could cool off in the sections between the cars), exhausted, hungry, thirsty, etc waiting for something, for anything to happen. When they finally announced the buses had arrived, we still had to wait another 45 minutes or so for them to clear the tracks or whatever so they could slide the train 10 minutes to the nearest station.

At 1:30am, they piled us into 3 coaches, and an hour later, we finally arrived in Lyon. Then we got to wait some more while they got organized, splitting us into groups (those who needed a hotel, those who needed taxis, then grouping the taxi people by location), giving us refund forms and a prepackaged box of unappetizing food, before I finally got into a taxi with 3 other people who lived in my neighborhood, and walked into my room at 3:30 am, only 6 hours later than I should have. Thus a 4.5 hour trip turned into a 10 hour trip. Moral of the story: take a tip from the bears and hibernate for the winter. At least we got to speak some French with the nice people in our train car and play some trivial pursuit (where we learned Americans are smarter than Brits--duh).

On the way home, the taxi driver (like every single French person) asked me what I liked about France. The food, the beauty, the language. And obviously, the reliable trains.

Just another Saturday in France.