resumption

Writing on the road is its unique form of procrastination. There's always something else you think you should be doing - talking to locals, figuring out the train schedule, drinking in the sights, drinking, or at the very least taking a nap. Sleep is a type of currency on the road usually in shorter supply than the actual thing. But I've settled down in Tuebingen for a while now and really, if I let this absence go on any longer I should just stop kidding myself that I'm keeping a blog, and use the webspace to post cute animal videos instead.

Tuebingen is small town nestled in the hills. The single river that cuts through it is the smaller, more romantic younger sibling of the Seine, and I swear, if you look up the word "quaint" in any dictionary, you'll find Tuebingen listed there, third down, right under "attractively old-fashioned."

I arrive early in the morning, my train packed full of students drunkenly catching the first ride home after a heavy night of partying at Stuttgart, a larger, more night-life friendly city. For a moment the scene is so familiar I might as well have been back at Brown: scantily clad girls with short skirts and sore feet, their male counterparts all nice shirts and casual indifference, broken when one of them groans as we exit a tunnel and into the light, pulling his hood doggedly over his eyes.

I'm cocooned by an eerie silence as I leave the station, the town still asleep, the roads free of cars and noise. After two weeks of being in big cities, the sudden stillness comes as a psychic shock, as if for the past fourteen days I'd been walking headlong against 40-mile-an-hour winds - teeth clenched, body tilted forward at seventy degrees - only to suddenly fall forward as all the winds die down at once, complete and utter silence stretching to the horizon in every direction around me.

I find myself in an oddly meditative state. Off in the distance I hear the toll of church bells caught in the breeze, the notes drifting like poppy seeds. A single bus passes me by, empty but for its driver, and I watch it vanish around a corner

The hostel the university set us up with has a several hundred person capacity, and upon arrival I discover I've somehow ended up in a single with my own shower. After two weeks of learning how to lean into the discomfort of traveling, this is a godsend.

That's right, the climax of this post is me taking a shower. If you've ever lived out of a bag for an extended length of time you'll understand.