A great little adventure!

If you are reading my posts carefully (I hope you really do ;-) you will know that I have been to Nice two weeks ago. I was visiting Sarah, she is currently there for five months to do some university lectures and of course to collect some experiences of living in a whole new world.
As a matter of a fact I'm currently not able to fly because of some unfortunate illness so I had to go there by train which took me almost 21 hours to get there and 20 hours to get back to Vienna again. Here are some impressions of this adventure:

I needed to get up at 5 in the morning in order to catch the first train that would take me to Venice Mestre, the first stop:

Unfortunately this train got about one hour late during the journey so I missed all of the following connections. That sucked! As one is not even able to board a train in Italy without a reservation I had to get myself new ones. And for sure I had to find new connections first. After one hour waiting and struggling in Mestre I finally got on board of a really nice Eurostar train that took me to my next stop. Milano Centrale:

You can't even call this thing a train station anymore. That's a train metropolis and probably the biggest building I have ever been inside.

Again I needed to get together all of my Italian skills to get new connections and reservations that would fit my plans. Well, the travel assistances at all Italian train stations where I have been acted pretty cool. As they recognized the delay of my first train I didn't have to pay for another ticket at all.
At this moment I wasn't that confident anymore about arriving at Nice on the same day. It realized that it took me around 13 hours to get from Vienna to Milano so I already started thinking of staying at one place and waiting for the next day and new opportunities to come. But the travel assistant was pretty sure that I can make it if there will be no more delays and so I boarded the next Eurostar train heading for Genova hoping for a smooth and of course a fast ride.

Genova was just a short stop but there was enough time to grab something to eat and to watch a statue of 'Cristoforo Colombo' in front of the station. The following train took me to Ventimiglia, a small Italian town near the border of Italy and France. It was 23:32 when I got there, almost 19 hours of overall travel time.

The train from Ventimiglia to Nice was the worst of all... First it had a delay of 5 minutes. Followed by 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30. By the time we finally left Ventimiglia at 00:20 or something I should have been to Nice already. This sucking train was so slow that I probably could have been riding a turtle much faster. I've been totally wasted when I finally got to Nice. 20 hours and 33 minutes of overall travel time...

There is nothing else to say about than to quote famous Michael 'Air' Jordan: 'Why drive, when you can fly?" ;-)

See you soon with lots of pictures from Nice!

Yours, Max