Even more Day 1 of the travel to an environmental conference without breaking the environment.

#BumpityBoulevardOnTheRails

The traveling went faster than the blogging so now I’m playing catch-up. I’m looking for barriers and benefits to this way of traveling and finding both. So much of our behaviour connects to the stories we tell ourselves.

Which stories will serve us best?

Liege-Guillemins train station suggests that all the cool business people take the train.

Its colourful glass roof has red and yellow stripes and sweeping architecture. It matches the formally dressed staff of the Belgian Thalys train.

Minibar at our seat. 🙂

There is a dining car but I haven’t visited. I’m too busy enjoying my vacation and glueing things into my tiny scrapbook.

My other mission on this trip is to visit bookstores and libraries to add to my collections. We’ll see how that goes.

We’re about to go into warp drive. The tracks must change here, because the second half of the trip to Paris is always twice as fast. 290 kilometers per hour.

About 145 miles per hour.

Went to the kiosk on board, but didn’t understand the concept. A Thalys employee slammed metal cupboards shut  in classic airline kitchen style, but there was no visible menu.

Too shy to ask. Silly, but bravery comes and goes with me. (Or it was the airline kitchen “story” that made me hesitate?) Customers aren’t usually welcome back there.

More research needed. An app and coupons were mentioned by the conductor  when someone asked. In a novel you don’t always understand how things work either.

There were two vending machines–coffee (broken) and snacks. A man bought something from the vending machine with his phone. Hadn’t ever seen that before.

Technology breaks the “exact change only” barrier. The barrier created by the older technology of vending machines.

Thinking a lot about when technology connects us and when it divides us. Is a train network more or less community-building than our internet? Both are a “democratiza

Next post: Paris!