my first day of our vacation today

i get up at 8:00, check email, drink a cup of tea, take a shower, then collect all the things one needs when going on vacation: underwear, socks, shirts, shoes, books, thinkpad, camera, ipod — astonishingly enough i manage to stuff everything into the suitcase (the thinkpad and camera go into the backpack). then it's a round of last minute cleanups and i'm off to the station to catch first the local train to zürich, then the ICE to stuttgart, then the IC to nürnberg and finally the ICE to erlangen … in zürich it's the usual round: getting a sandwich, a bottle of mineralwater at migros (at CHF 1.05 definitely cheaper than CHF 3.80 at the sandwich place or on the train) and a newspaper (the tagesanzeiger at a whopping CHF 2.50, quite a bit for such a little paper).
the train ride from zürich to stuttgart is fairly uneventful: today i'm travelling as a tourist and don't need to work. uneventful, that is, except for the mutilations inflicted on the german language by the tagesanzeiger (at least one case of using dativ instead of genitiv ("dem wolf sein lebensrecht"), a glaring bug in the first headline on page two ("es gibt modell …"), and a couple of minor wounds) — it's astonishing that a newspaper with such a big claim cannot afford to have proper editing…

the ICE arrives on time in stuttgart as does the IC to nürnberg — unfortunately, we seem to have a problem with the front car and its communication lines back to the engine at the back of the train: after an energetic start we rather abruptly come to a standstill — it takes them about 10 minutes to get this sorted. the train is quite full, even in first class — which is not a suprise as it's friday afternoon.

opposite me sits a young-ish woman who looks remarkably like a blond version of "duck face" henrietta from four weddings and a funeral. and she behaves like that, rather arrogant towards the conductor who in the end threatens to declare her ticket void (she's got an online ticket and but didn't sign her bahncard and  refuses to do "these petty little things" just because the conductor asks her to — i'm tempted to drop her a  €1 coin for her performance…