Tetris

This is one of the funniest things I've seen on you tube in ages - Human Tetris from Japan. What I find really funny is the panic in the faces as they try to work out how to get into the correct shapes to fit through the holes!

I see that you can now book (or very soon) Eurostar tickets online in conjunction with regional tickets. So if you want to go to Paris from York, you'll get it in one place.

Link

Now, there is a very good European site called Seat61, which has tons of information about European train travel. I used this extensively when booking my tickets to go to the World Cup in Germany in 2006 as there is loads of useful stuff on it. However, the ultimate European train site has to be the DeutscheBahn site (LINK)which lets you search every train in Europe (and I've just checked - it allows you to include York in it's search). So why have they bothered to do it? I guess it makes it easier for people, but I don't know many people who book train tickets online. As the online services are not great for train travel, in my experience. I don't trust the train company websites to give me the right price for love nor money - I'd rather buy the single fare to get to London and then do the rest on Eurostar's site.

As an aside, a total journey time of 10 hours and 21 minutes to go by train from York to Dortmund by train is impressive but I wonder how many people would consider it. Take into account the entire travel time to get from York to Dortmund by air (assuming you can fly from Leeds to Dortmund) would be:

• Drive from York to Leeds Bradford - 1 hour
• Park and get to terminal - 30 minutes
  
• Check in before flight - at least 2 hours
• Flight - 3 hours (I've not checked that btw)
• Get off plane and collect bags - 45 minutes
• Get into central Dortmund - 45 minutes
  

So, a total there for about 8 hours by air. None of which would be particularly stress free as airports these days are just a nightmare. Compare that to 10 hours on some of the most efficient, clean, well serviced and comfortable trains you can travel on these days. That's worth two hours of my time any day. But I'll bet the ticket to get from York to London costs more than the air fare alone.

Shame.