Train diaries

This moment, I am in the Romanian room listening to the music by Mahler which has given this blog its name. It's past midnight, Dea is asleep and Petra just came to show me an email our future flatmate sent her. There was initial confusion to their correspondence, which started some days ago, when Petra got an email titled "Hallo Anita". The matter was cleared and now we know something about the Czech girl who will arrive here on the first day of March.

Somewhere in Eastern Slovenia.
Her questions until now have been pretty straightforward, as have been our comments: "Is there a cd player in the room" ("Aaaargh, she probably doesn't have a laptop then to share in the internet costs"), "Can you tell me what there is in the apartment" ("Where to begin, the broken teacups or the spluttering vacuum cleaner...."), "I haven't got any reply from the landlady!! Is this normal?" ("How to break it to her...").

Somewhere in Upper Austria.
This last week has been full of train trips. Altogether, I have travelled over 1500 km during the last seven days. In the end, the rails have always brought me back home - safe, trustworthy and friendly Graz. The trip to Zagreb (how nicely the two city names go together) and back was nice. There is a nice feeling to passing passport checkpoints - the first stamp in my new one!! - and anonymously rolling on, not looking back, not looking forward, just seeing what it looks like outside at the moment.

Somewhere in Bavaria.
At our hostel on the outskirts of the city, we met an early bird who looked like a Chinese businessman (what was he doing in a mixed dorm), Kristiansandian Irene (we already knew she was Norwegian because we took a sneak peek at her postcards) who was on a six-month leave from work and in no hurry to get back home (my enthusiastic suggestion "You could even go to Turkey from here" was greeted by a blank stare and a "Yes, I could go to Australia if I wanted to"), Two English-speaking guys who suggested some joint programme (it didn't work out but they still followed us until the railway station) and a pair of slightly freakish Erasmus exchange students from the British isles ("You're also Erasmus?? Yeah, so you know what we mean when we say alcohol consumption huh??").

Maybe there'll be a post on Zagreb later but now it's time to sink into a dreamless sleep..