July 18 – Preparing for the Journey Home

Well folks, our baecation is coming to a close. Today was a long day of travel. We bought round trip tickets from Munich, so since we woke up in France, we had some traveling to do. Today we took a train from Marignier to Geneva, then flew from Geneva to Munich via easyJet (more on how “easy” that was later).

We had to start the day early, which wasn’t as much of a problem as I thought it was going to be as I passed out into a deep sleep last night after our amazing tour de France day.

We arrived in Geneva with 3 hours to kill before we needed to go to the airport. We explored the city a little bit more. This city seemed to be under much more construction than all other cities we’ve been to. I guess they are making it biggerer and betterer.

One think I forgot to mention about Suisse cities on the lake is the use of the paddle boat ferry…or whatever they are called. They use a spinning wheel on their sides to power them instead of a big prop, or whatever else boats use to go. Magnets. Here’s a picture:

And just for kicks, here’s the fountain again soaking the nearby boats.

We spent an hour at a nice bakery/coffee shop where we were able to get food without spending all of our money. Seriously, I don’t know how/why people eat out in Switzerland. Crazy.

After that, Ikumi went to some grocery stores to load up on some delicious Suisse chocolate. If you are lucky, you might get some. Probably not though.

We then went to a nice little park by the train station and relaxed before our flight. Nearby was a cool house with bats on it. Neat.

We arrived at the airport almost 2.5 hours before our flight. Seemed ridiculous, but it was not!

For 130 European fake money (Euro, I guess), I got 2 tickets from Geneva to Munich. If I wanted to use a real airline, it was gonna cost like 300 Euro. Seemed like a deal too hard to pass up. It almost wasn’t, and no because the plane crashed due to being broken.

We showed up at the apparently “routine” bag drop, and there were already 50 million people in line. Now, I dunno if you people have ever flown easyJet before, but it ain’t easy. Should be called “moderately difficult jet” or “stand in line for 2 hours before your flight instead of doing something that’s not that jet”.

Anyway, the tickets specifically say to show up two hours before your flight is set to leave to drop off your bags. They also say to be at the gate 30 minutes before your flight because they close the doors on you. That gives you 90 minutes to drop off your bag, go through security, and get to gate. That seemes reasonable until you show up and see this line for step 1:

We were able to clear it in 35 minutes. We also entered the line 15 minutes before we were supposed to. Rebellious.

Fortunately, we went through some top secret security line that was extremely quick. We didn’t have to shake our shoes off. Terrorists barely won today.

We showed up at the gate with 40 minutes to spare. Had we not arrived that 15 minutes early, and hadn’t had an easy security time, it would have been close.

However, the rest of the process, including the flight, went surprising well! Only hiccup was this weird as hell boarding setup which only caused a mob:

The trip was basically just a flight over the Alps, so we go some sweet pictures as well.

Ikumi took that last one. Damn, it’s a gorgeous picture.

After we landed, we had to get on two busses (no, not at the same time) to get to our Airbnb. This was a bit contentious, because we landed in a smaller terminal without the usual box to buy bus tickets from, and no obvious bus stops. But together, we figured it out and made it! We went to the quick-e-mart thing across the street to get dinner and beer, and we been chilling ever since.

There is a TV here that we turned on, but didn’t watch much. I meant to say the other night we watched some French TV at our spot in France. Now French TV is real TV in that every show/channel features people speaking French. This may not be a totally fair assessment, as half the channels were showing the French soccer (yeah, I still call it soccer, and you should too; fight me) team returning to Paris, but still, no dubbing. Only French.

German TV on the other hand….the only non-dubbed shows were news and one dating show. Everything else was normal American shows, but dubbed. And it was terrible. Imagine Bob’s Burgers without H. Jon Benjamin. Now imagine it with a semi-enthused German voicing Bob. How about Star Trek Voyager dubbed over? And I have one more for you…Cool Runnings with a German dub. Absolute abomination.

Fortunately, this was only a minor inconvenience to our otherwise great trip! Tomorrow we do the big flight home, so I hope there are some good movies to watch…and if they are dubbed in German, I will be the screaming baby.

-Babe