on the road

"Ich gehe wieder auf Reisen
mit meiner leisen Gefährtin
der Einsamkeit

Wir bleiben zu zweien einsam
und haben nichts weiter gemeinsam
als diese Gemeinsamkeit"

(Mascha Kaléko)


i’m on the road again, heading to chicago, going by train – i think, not a single one of the americans i have talked to has ever taken a train anywhere. crazy country! health care reform and public transportation, that’s what you need people, really – please schedule the revolution for some time before my next visit…

and it is a real adventure: first, you check in your baggage. i mean – compare this to my normal train catching routine: oh no. train leaves pretty much now. well. let’s see how fast we can move (quote from brett, but fits to my routine perfectly). here: you arrive at the station about an hour before the train goes. you check in your luggage. you don’t “hop on the train as long as it’s there” – you “board it”. and you’re not supposed to bring any liquids – “i mean, soap and shampoo are okay, you know, but don’t bring anything else” as the nice man at the counter explained to me – at least not in your checked-in luggage. I wonder what they'd do if i filled liquid nitro-glycerine into my 1l (about a quarter gallon) water bottle and took it onto the train in my hand luggage…. “two small personal items, including purses and laptops”, that is.



anyway, you can say what you want about the us transportation system but they do have extremely comfortable trains with legrests and everything.


no plugs, though, that’s sad, but: legrests and a lot of room to stretch out or roll up or do whatever.



and they serve lunch, if only for a certain number of people - you have to sign up real quickly or otherwise you won’t get any. i think for people travelling all the way from seattle that might imply a certain threat, but on the other hand: better a couple of people than none, right. i however was not interested in getting any because i was well equipped with half a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread and a couple of apples and my nitro-glycerine water.

the surroundings are extremely pretty. we’re through wild and rough nature here, a swamp or lake or river appearing on either side every once in a while, and hills by the horizon and autumn fondled trees all around, the sun is shining and the air-conditioning suggests a slight breeze, gently striking through the air.





i’m on the road again and will be, for another week – it’s not even amazing, it’s something beyond, that i have spent the last seven weeks here and now i’ll have to go back to school and life and normality and stuff – i kind of get what jack kerouac and his folks were up to when they kept on going back and forth throughout the us. i will spent an entire day in a train going from chicago to boston – i had to skip on washington, so sorry folks, no pics of me and the white house for this time – and i love going by train, so that’s cool, but still, it is amazing that now everything seems so far away and untouchable and out of sight out of mind but things will go back to normal in a little more than a week. i refuse to believe it for now and prefer staying in this bubble world. i'm on the road, listening to gerry mulligan, to bob dylan and cat stevens - i have a dog and i love him like my wife - or was it the other way around? anyway: if you want to sing out, sing out!



so, once we arrived in chicago – unfortunately the battery of my camera went low, so i couldn’t take pics of the amazing station, that reminded me of a crossing between a very pretty moscow metro station, a storehouse and a mine – i had to claim my baggage, literally like in an airport (cause how would i get it back otherwise, right? stupid sentence.)

anyway, i wanted to get rid of my gigantic backpack since i’m now travelling without klampfi, my beloved 20 euro flea market guitar, but instead with a duffle bag full of stuff (and the backpack, obviously), so i went on a quest to find one dollar bills for the locker. i did this a couple of times until i finally realized that there was a bill exchanging machine right in front of me. well.

i locked the backpack – and with it my camera battery recharger, so i might not be able to take pics of chicago unless i have a chance to swing by the station sometime today, doh! – and now needed to find comrade bunnie without having a number or a phone, for that matter. i needed to call brett in order to find out about that in the first place – remember folks, i had run out of minutes on my phone the other day, right…

and now i was running out of change – right, cause you never do, unless you really, really, really need quarters, of course. i bought some bubble gum and some other random stuff from a vending machine, called brett, who gave me bunnie’s number, who then either didn’t pick up the phone or maybe i’m just too dumb to use a payphone locally, i called brett again, but the phone was apparently broken cause he could not hear me – during this process i ran out of change a couple of times, bought some tictacs at a bookstore and asked the lady to give me as many quarters back as she could. she looked at me in a rather pitiful way and handed me over 7 quarters with which i finally reached brett again who then organized our get together, and without him the whole thing would probably have taken three to an indefinite number of hours (instead of one) to find bunnie or a place to stay. what would i only do without you? :)

well, we finally ran into each other.

so. chicago.

bunnie drove me around downtown and showed me some of the main highlights, then we went to his home. he lives in a neighbourhood that is 99 per cent black and that in his words “has gotten much better, after they built that apartment building over there, no shootings anymore and the constant police presence has scared all drug dealers away. it used to be worse, i had two people been killed in front of my house, they had some quarrel going on with their drug provider” – a genuine american city experience, i take it.

bunnie takes good care of me, though. he lives in a big apartment with his 18 year-old daughter, jasmine, they have a completely out of tune piano and a pool table and they cooked an awesome beens and cornbread and salad dinner yesterday, that was great – also, they try everything to make me feel at home and it works, too. only thing is, i sometimes have a little trouble understanding them – it is a very specific register they speak, one i’m not familiar with. i’m getting in there, but it’s not as easy as has been before – wow, for the past seven weeks i have come to understand a lot about how little english i really knew or know…. sad.

anyway, we played some pool (yes, i do suck.) and then i went to the movie’s with jasmine and a couple of her friends, who have very interesting piercings (spikes through their cheeks – never seen that before) and tattoos (on the upper ear? really? ouch!). we saw a scary movie and you all know how much i like scary movies, “paranormal” – the first half is intriguingly boring, but the rest freaked me out for the moment. was not as scary as the dark knight, though – on the other hand, the latter one has heath ledger starring, so it’s more worth it. well. after that we wandered around the theatre and went straight to the next movie, and yes, i was done with the world by then, but okay, whatever: couples retreat. okayish. funny, in a way, touching, at least it’s supposed to be, but well, i was up for about 20 hours by then and just tired.

so. whatever i’ve seen of chicago so far was interesting, it’s definitely very different from all of the other places i’ve seen here so far, it reminds me more of what i remember from seeing on the prince from bel air (yes i know that’s not chicago, still reminds me), but so far it also has not struck me with impressiveness. we’ll see, i was completely wrong about minneapolis, too, so maybe i’m just a crabby person who always regards things sceptically at first. i’ve never thought of myself that way, but you never fade to learn, right?

i hope i will have a chance to take at least a couple of pics and to recharge my battery – also, because i need something to do on the way to boston, man, 23 hours, my laptop will die after 3.5…. shit.

if i don’t have a chance to take pics, however, i’ll try to do it the old-schoolish descriptive way. for now, i need to get some breakfast. bye folks, thx for reading!