The Spontaneous Trip

Last Thursday, the sudden re-emergence (is that without a hyphen?) of the idea to go to Leipzig kept bothering me all morning, and, deciding that there was only one satisfactory solution to my indecisiveness, I called ÖBB's efficient customer service, squeezed my eyes shut and dictated the credit card number, met Maiju at the mensa to get my backpack back (repeat those last two words in quick succession), informed a couple of friends and some teachers warning them about my vanhisment and, some hours later, set out.

For my first time here, ticket inspectors invaded the tram (my Stundenkarte was valid). The train trip to Vienna (always longer than I expected) was spent chatting with a freshly graduated singer from our university, a viola teacher from our university, and a businessman who, midway, realised the company he works for sponsors certain facilities of our university, so I guess you could say we were all magically linked together by coincidence. I dug out my iPod when the conversation turned to the wonderful world of parenting.

At Vienna's Südbahnhof, I headed to my platform only to find that the train standing there was heading to Moscow via Warsaw. Since Germany is not exactly in this direction, I went to the information desk to ask where my train was, but the clerk was adamant that the "Chopin" service to Russia was my train. Still very unbelieving, I went through all the wagons to see where they were headed. When I arrived to the last wagon and saw a group of drunk Russian teenagers smoking outside it, I thought that I was being played some very unamusing joke, but going back to the beginning of the train I found a wagon with a small noticeboard with Dresden written on it.

I was lucky to have a sleeping compartment all for myself. The ones next door were filled with women in their 50s on some sort of group tour. They lost no time in digging out their booze the minute we left the station, and kept walking past my open door and flashing frightening smiles at me, at which point I felt grateful the door could be locked. I spent some time awake in my compartment, listening to a very nice cd I got from a friend who compiled it for me as a late birthday present, writing and drawing in my journal, having a delicious Austrian yoghurt, enjoying the feeling of the railway tracks speeding under me, taking me with them wherever I wanted to go, and then turned off the light for the night.

We arrived some minutes late at Dresden, and since I anyway only had 7 minutes to catch the next one, I was practically out the door before we had ground to a halt at the Hauptbahnhof and ran for my life, reaching the bullet-age ICE train at the other side of the station at the very second the conductor blew his departure whistle. I reached Leipzig's railway station, one of the biggest in Europe, an hour later, after travelling for thirteen hours.

The two days spent in Leipzig with CM Swing were fun. The weather was extremely windy, and since we often had to walk past a construction site it sometimes felt like half of the city was stuck in our nostrils and throats. Central Globetrotters Hostel was located between a cannabis-themed shop called Kif Kif and a Sex store, and very near the railway station. The closing concert of the a cappella festival was impressive, hosting big names like The Real Group (on very bad form, it seemed to me) and the German group Basta, a group I definitely want to hear more from in the future.

On the trip back, I didn't have a sleeping compartment, but the compartment I was sitting in during the night-time trip was anyway empty (except for a hippie who joined me for some hours and asked me to wake him up when we were in Nürnberg) so I was actually able to sleep two hours straight before the Austrian border. The rest of the trip went remarkably quickly. I listened to Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony three times, read a little, stared out the window into the night, almost lost my glasses, and, at the crucial moment, tried to catch Bamberg's station dashing by for waving to my cousin.

Bright and modern Linz railway station wasn't my idea of the perfect place to spend an hour in the early morning, but I had no choice and spent it getting some coffee and breakfast and browsing magazines. On the last stretch of the trip, a woman with a speaking disorder started chatting with me. Since I was too tired to concentrate too much on the narrative, one misunderstanding led to another and soon she saw me as a poor boy studying music in Graz because it was better than studying in Germany - I only got to go home to Leipzig every two months but, yes, kept contact with my parents as often as possible.