Totally off topic, but tell us about your Leipzig trip, Damarell! I have plans to go there this year or next but not yet sorted out the details. No only was it the main place for Johann Sebastian Bach,
We have been during a Bach festival, but our trips are less highbrow; for some years we have gone to the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, the giant German goth (and metal, pagan-y folk, EBM, industrial, etc) festival in Leipzig, which is about as big relative to Leipzig as the Whitby Goth Weekend is relative to Whitby.
We used to get the DB sleeper from Paris to Germany, but this wasn't ideal even when it did exist; you have to change in Paris which smells of wee and get off the train at oh God am in Berlin or Munich to change to a train to Leipzig. We went once on the Russian State Railways sleeper which replaced it (the economics seem to be different if you are running all the way to Moscow), which is quite sumptuous, but doesn't always run on convenient days. Hence, these days we get the train to Harwich (there is a once-daily direct service from Cambridge which connects with the ferry), the ferry to Hoek (which also wakes you up at oh God am, as discussed), curse the interminable works on the railway from Hoek to Rotterdam which mean we have had to take a ghastly endless replacement bus for a couple of years now, and get a series of day trains to Leipzig. We do the return journey the whole way on day trains - the ferry isn't at a convenient sleeping point in the return journey.
When you are in Leipzig I recommend seeing:
- filthy goths, but perhaps they won't be there, and likewise you may not be able to go and drink absinthe cocktails at 4am.
- The Volkerschlachtdenkmal, the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, Napoleon's great defeat at Leipzig. Rationally speaking this is much smaller than a modern skyscraper but its stone construction makes it look utterly colossal. The first time we went one of us caught sight of it from the train and said "what the hell is that?"
- The Stasi museum, if you read reasonable German and are interested in that sort of thing. One year they displayed all their paperwork on the Gruftis, the oddball pre-unification DDR goths, who the Stasi appear to have concluded were weird but basically harmless.
- The historic tram museum, if you are a giant nerd. However, it's only open one weekend in six or so, and is quite small, so don't plan a day around it.
- Colditz Castle is about 90 minutes' bus ride away; they do a tour which IIIRC lasts 2-3 hours.