Das Sinn im Bahnsinn (original) (raw)
footpad 😃happy
December 13 2010, 22:36
Listens: everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance
It's cold in Germany—a bit below zero, cold enough that you don't really want to be standing around on a platform in the wrong town in the wrong state in, arguably, the wrong federation. But here I am, having fallen asleep on the train, slept through my connection in Mannheim, ended up in Stuttgart, waited there for the next train in the right direction, found that it was delayed, and realised that I not only probably wasn't going to make my connection to Zurich, but that I was probably wasn't even going to make it to the safe haven of Switzerland and sane transport. Let's face it: I was going to get stuck in the arse end of Germany in some bedbugbucket of a hotel with nothing to do for the next six hours but hold a staring competition with the wallpaper.
Fortunately, everything was delayed. The entire German public transport system seems to have time-warped itself twenty-five minutes into its own future, and is reeling around there looking shell-shocked. So I'm now sitting on a nice warm ICE train that's going in roughly the right direction, and I'm sipping cold beer while tapping away at my computer and really feeling that, despite all the myriad things that have gone wrong today, the world is a promising and gentle place.