Everyone pretty much went or is going home, a mass exodus of foreign students because no one is actually ever from here. The cité universitaire (the dorms) are haunted only by the forlorn echo of a door closing somewhere above or below you, and the hush of a big building with few people. Most anyone who’s left is doing laundry, and tinny Christmas music blares from the foyer. I wonder how much the receptionists hate it.
For my part, and I likely speak for my colleagues, not having anything to do is an unaccustomed and perhaps somewhat uncomfortable feeling—life is no longer predetermined, and there is no polycopié inducing guilt from the bookshelf. You can tell how the semester is going by the collective note of panic in everyone’s facebook statuses, reflecting long hours at the library, too many papers, a triumphal word count update or occasionally the expression of pure misery. The general burst of euphoria following the end of semester gave way to a general perplexity and a communal “…now what?” I don’t know either.
And I’m homeless again. In the hope of finding someone to take my room while I’m gone I packed everything I owned, distributed it among various friends who were maintaining their rooms, and cleared the premises. For the next two months I will live out of a backpack that is already too full without having much in it. I forget Christmas is next week. I felt like I’ve barely seen the sun for weeks, and my sudden parole has left me unprepared for the holiday spirit. Though I am going to Germany where, in my opinion, Christmas more or less is done properly (replete with Christmas markets, kitsch of all kinds and pre-Christmas Advent and St. Nicholas celebrations), I’m not going to any place I would call “home”, instead shuttling around among couches in a country which once was mine but to which I by all rights no longer belong. But I will be among my adopted my family, by which I mean that community of individuals who have taken such good care of me for all the years I’ve been a vagabond, a packrat, a holiday orphan, or just passing through. These days it seems all I ever do is pass through, and any time I start settling down, the little voice in the back of my mind starts encouraging me to pack my bag and move on.
(time elapses)
In Bern my trip took a turn for the worse. I was supposed to change in Bern to Basel, so, toting various backpacks, laptop bags, plastic bags with extraneous food products including a very large quantity of chocolate, I exited the train at Bern, happily took the escalator up to the main platform….to discover my connection had a 30-minute delay. There was no way I would make my connection (what to do what to do what to do what to do what to do) to the other Basel station (frustratingly, there are two train stations in Basel, the Swiss one and the German one, and you can’t all that easily from one to another). The train of which I had just gotten off would continue on to Olten and Zürich, and I remember having gone through Olten (what to do what to do what to do what to do what to do) on my way to Freiburg once, so…. Hectically I dashed down the platform to the train I had just gotten off, finding no maps no departure no other information, no ticket taker who could have helped me, no no no no no nothing (what to do what to do what to do what to do what to do!!!). Still unsure I went back up to the main platform—still dragging sundry and all baggage, resulting in a noticeable tilt to starboard due to my laptop bag—and found a map showing Olten to be more or less (what to do what to do what to do what to do what to do) between Bern and Freiburg. On a wing and a prayer I decided to risk the train to Olten, with the possibility that there would be no trains to Basel or that I would get to Basel too late to get on to Germany (what to do what to do what to do what to do what to do). Deciding to give it a go, I dash back down the platform where, by some miracle of which I was undeserving, the train I had just gotten off of was still there. I hopped back in, coincidentally in the same compartment, and spent the next twenty minutes desperately trying to connect with someone in Germany who would tell me when and if I would ever make it to my destination.
I was so preoccupied with my possible timetables and would I make my connection in Olten that I almost forgot to get off at Olten, and barely managed to collect my belongings and fight my way against the stream of boarding passengers like a giant malformed red salmon. I hurried three platforms over in the hope of catching a connecting train 3 minutes later, which turned out not to exist, which meant I had then to change seven platforms in the other direction to wait for my next train to Basel (Swiss). Upon boarding the train, upset, flustered and tired and looking forward to the yoghurt I had packed as at least a minor improvement in my evening, I discovered that said yoghurt had responded to Newton’s Third Law, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Some action must have compressed its fragile plastic domicile, and in lawful reaction it exploded all over everything. They say yoghurt is good for the skin and I hope they’re right, ‘cause I kinda had to use it as hand cream (no Kleenex at hand).
Basel, of course, was a continuation of my previous disaster, as the S-Bahn over to the other Basel station is at the very very end and somehow half as long as the others, so a very hectic and almost painful odyssey over there made defeat all the more bitter when I discovered I had missed the transfer by about two minutes. Thankfully, in some last-ditch attempt to refute Murphy’s law, there was a (fast) train to Freiburg some minutes later. It is, of course, considerably more expensive than the train I otherwise would have taken, but at that point there was nothing I could do to change that.
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