Parcly Taxel: Living and sometimes sleeping bound to a bottle for several years awakened an obscure magic within my heart – a wish of my own to bask in the cultures of places far from my hometown of Canterlot. Saddle Arabian genies don't usually feel this way, having enough companions in their own customisable vessels to bounce around news and fables of lands beyond the desert which they nevertheless treat with much dignity.

My previous trips abroad had only reached as far as Hokkaido at one extreme and Victoria at the other, both within four hours' time difference. To any city in my present trip was now a six-hour difference (because of daylight savings), where jet lag starts to significantly screw up sleep/wake cycles. Spindle helped me project a vision of the stars overhead as I was still a little woozy from final packing, asking me to at least take solace in travelling westwards where recovering from jet lag is faster.

Spindle: 12 hours and 10000 kilometres to Frankfurt on a lone pair of wings at 11.5 kilometres up is far from easy, even for an alicorn. Given that daybreak would occur sometime during our flight and that Parcly was more used to magically floating from her flask's neck than beating something gifted to her body (I met her while she was still a young unicorn), I whipped up a silky-smooth, comfortable airstream for her to glide on, guiding her by the corresponding aurora in her dreams.

Parcly: Hey! Whaddya mean by comfortable? The air up there was even colder than the freezing abodes of your kind…

Spindle: It surrounded your body like a tube. Perhaps your unconscious was tricking you by providing a ground to admire the aurora from. (giggles)

Parcly: My Tantabus? (giggles with blushing)

Still, during my sleeper flight I also passed over many other lands for the first time in my life. Over the Indian subcontinent, home of the lamias whose snaking, slender forms make them a worthwhile companion to genies. Over Iran, where the sphinx-like citizens known as lammasu prowl the good earth. Across the Black Sea and into the eastern reaches of the European Union – Romania and its bat ponies, then Hungary, then Austria.

Spindle: Finally, after flying over all that was happening down below, we landed in Frankfurt at 7:15 in the morning.

At the time of my real-life flight there were no Covid-19 restrictions when travelling out from Singapore or into Germany. However I had suffered a large dose of the virus on 11 July, only testing negative the day before departure. Prior to that infection I had received three vaccine doses; printed certificates were brought along just in case (they ended up not being needed at Frankfurt Airport).

When the petite alicorn yawned herself awake she found my ethereal, glowing body draped like an oversized beanie atop her head, literally freezing her thought process in this German summer. From where we were – Frankfurt Flughafen – we wanted to get to München Hbf, but for a while Parcly confused the former with Frankfurt (M) Hbf. The two stations aren't the same!

Parcly: It mattered little in the end, since we stumbled on ICE 527, a through train service from Frankfurt Flughafen to München Hbf. Armed with a pre-purchased European rail pass we set off on a path through dense forests, expansive fields punctuated by power pylons, backwater villages served at best by local stations or buses, graffiti-laden infrastructure, wind farms and much more.

Despite being colloquially described as "high-speed", we found out soon enough that this applied only to some segments, the rest being at most slightly faster than Autobahn stretches. It took approximately four hours to reach Munich.