Day 18: Small town chill to the City of Lights

I'd always wanted to visit Switzerland. It seemed like one of the coolest, most laidback and laissez-faire countries in the world, concerned more with producing excellent chocolate than getting its nose dirty politically on the world stage. Switzerland always struck me as a country where you leave all cares and concerns behind and live in aspiration of a higher common goal of unity.

Yesterday, I got the chance to spend a few hours in Basel, Switzerland's third-largest city (pop. 198,000). There was a bit of a foul-up with my train from Milan to Basel and I go to the city about an hour and a half later than expected, but the timing meant I was arriving at the warmest part of the day on an already abnormally warm day. Like, this is late February and we were sitting outside at a cafe by the SBB in just sweaters. Sweaters! February! For a Canadian used to February temperatures of close to -40 with the wind chill, sitting outside in a sweater is unheard of — and such a beautiful concept, it makes me want to pack up and head to Europe every winter to escape the cold.

My next stop after Basel was Paris via the TGV and I don't know if I'll ever get tired of zooming along on a rail track at 300km/h. For someone who thinks being able to get up to 70km/h on her scooter is fantastic because of how much damn traffic there is in Toronto, these high-speed trains are awesome. We did stop for about 40 minutes somewhere outside of Dijon in a rural town because of mechanical difficulties on the track, and it was close to 20:30 by the time we hit Gare de Lyon.

I splurged on my hotel room on Hotwire and got a super nice one in Paris, and my reaction to everything has been, "Oh. Oh oh OH!" I mean, I walk outside and there's the magnifique Palais Garnier. I have slippers and a bathrobe in my bathroom. There's a Bose radio beside my bed and my bed — I've never sunk into anything so cushy, comfortable and luxurious. I have double doors opening onto a little courtyard patio, a wall-mounted flatscreen TV, phone in the bathroom by the toilet and a doorbell. Depending on how you travel, I've been traveling either light or heavy with a backpack and messenger bag. The concierge asked if he could take my bags from me and take them to my room and I was all like, "Whaa? No, why would you do that? I can manage just fine." But he insisted and I was glad. They were a little heavy and it was nice to be free of them; and besides, when you're paying this much for a hotel room, you let other people service you. It's just a concept I'm not used to.

It was raining last night and it still is today — guess my great luck with the weather couldn't last forever. But man, with a bed this comfortable, it's probably a better idea to take a nap and wait for the rain to stop. Oh, and cool fact about my hotel: it was the place where the Lumière Brothers had their very first public screening. For a film nut like myself, that's just an incredibly cool bonus on an already splendiforous experience.