Freakishly Happy

We had been warned that Brest was rather ugly, but it was our intention to visit Britannia and the coast.  Our plan was to stay in Brest when we got there, as our train arrived around midnight, and take a bus to a coastal city the next day.  Unfortunately, it came to pass that the busses were closed on Sunday (Yes, we're a couple of days behind in blogging trying to catch up).  In fact, almost the entire town was closed on Sunday!  Therefore we found ourselves booking a second night from the hotel, staying in and thus staying warm, and blogging about Paris and working on the internet.  Max even got on the computer for a little while.  At that point we didn't mind the fresh french hot chocolate on a cold rainy day, along with the warm glow of an internet-connected laptop screen to keep us entertained.

We did have a rather interesting meal at a britannian sea food restaurant that evening which included raw oysters that had a worm on the outside and white fish slathered in mustard.  All in all, brest is ugly and cold and the ocean is industrialized and/or military.  *Yuck!*

The next day we woke up and got out on a good start.  We went to the train station to inquire about going to the small britannian villages that Maxime had told us about only to find out that it would set us days behind on our schedule.  Finding no other way to work it in, we ended up spending the afternoon on a train back to Paris and a night train down to Spain.  The train station was quite an experience, we ended up waiting for an hour and a half in multiple lines because they kept closing lines on us and nobody spoke English or German and the french people seemed to cut around us at every opportunity.  It was the pinnacle of french inefficiency and rudeness.  By this point we wanted to get the hell out of Brest, and didn't mind leaving the rest of France behind.

The train to Paris was rather nice, we passed by two and a half hours of wonderful brittianic countryside before delving into a game of 'ghoules and ghosts' on our laptop.  During our two hour layover in Paris we had to switch train stations using the Metro, However Joni had a very strong craving for Japanese udon noodles and we found ourselves looking for some phantom place she had seemed to remember seeing when we were there before, but ended up going to an asian snackery, which seemed to satisfy both of us.  The night train wasn't quite a nice as our first but it served its purpose well.  Our 6-bed room was filled and the people were nice, we were both able to drift off to sleep with the warm comfort of waking up in the morning and not being in France.