August 8th we woke up, wandered about Yangshuo a bit, verified the local computer shop had neither fixed nor managed to acquire the replacement for the eeePc charger, and the boarded a taxi to get to the Guilin airport. After a few hours delay in Guilin due to aircraft maintenance we reached Shanghai. After quite a few hours in the Shanghai airport, where food is scarce, expensive, and crappy we boarded our 12hr flight to Frankfurt. Unfortunately neither of us did well at sleeping on the flight. Many movies were watched. We deplaned at around 7am in Frankfurt in a fairly zombie-like state.
In Frankfurt we bought tickets through to Warsaw by rail. First ICE trains, like this from Frankfurt airport => Frankfurt Hauptbahnof => Berlin Haputbahnof:
Then a rather less fancy train from Berlin to Warsaw.
You might think the ICE trains in Germany were nicer. If we'd had reserved seats on the ICE routes they would have been. However, it turned out we did not so smug Germans with reservations bumped us anytime we scored a good seat. On the Berlin => Warsaw line we did have reserved seats and got to enjoy watching other people who didn't have them receive the bumping treatment.
Somehow this woman can remember every single person in the traincar and whether or not she's checked their ticket already despite people constantly moving around and getting on/off the train.
The view from the train in many ways reminded us of rural BC.
Some 37 hours after our journey began we reached Warsaw and headed to our hotel. Due to vagaries of hotel pricing the 5 star Sheraton in town was cheap so we had two nights of proper beds and a civilized bathroom to look forward to!
As any civilized traveller would do Rod immediately filled the sink with stinky sandals.
We also tremendously enjoyed the fact that it was chilly when we arrived. Not being drenched in sweat from the exertion of walking a block or two was a very nice change.
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