Le dernier jour: Paris - traveling to Gare de l'Est station then Karlsruhe

Our train would leave Gare de l'Est station at half past eleven this morning, so we left the hotel around ten o'clock. We were surprised to find that Métro was still free this morning (it was free last night due to the New Year's celebration).

The city of Paris was probably a mess this morning. We changed Métro trains at the Châtelet station, perhaps one of the busiest subway stations in Europe. It smelt like one giant urinal. Glass from broken florescent lamps were all over the passageways between different subway lines (i.e. parts of the station were not lit). But we managed to find our way to the connecting subway train.

The situation at Gare de l'Est station was much better, albeit some of the arrival and departure monitors were not working. The ones in the main hall, where all the passengers from Métro would arrive at, were not working. Bonne année!

We finally found a few monitors that worked and stood next to one of them to wait for the announcement of the track where we would board our Karlsruhe-bound train. Why wouldn't the French train company SNCF schedule this weeks in advance, similar to what Deutsche Bahn does? Je ne sais pas.

When the monitor announced that we would leave from track 5, we headed toward the TGV train parked there. Once boarded the train, we had a hard time finding our seats. The train interior designer decided that it was a good idea to give each seat two numbers, and one would be applicable for each journey depending on the train's direction of travel. The applicable seat number would light up for the journey, except that this lighting system was not functional for our journey. We just so happened to have the extreme seat numbers (i.e. the seats that would be at one end of the car if the train were traveling in one direction, or at the other end of the car if the train were to travel in opposite direction). Being a physicist I decided to choose the coordinate system for the seating plan of this journey (and avoided the hassle of moving).

Other than these minor snafus in France, the journey back to Karlsruhe was an orderly one.