So..o..o.. busy, with more traveling, to Berlin, on two consecutive weekends. The first, for a workshop with anthropologists at Humboldt University, which sent my mind whirling and swirling with forms and fluids, flows and fixes, scapes and spaces, tropes and metaphors, and more.
The night of my return to Goettingen, I woke with serious stomach upset from what felt like a food poisoning, probably from a salad I picked up at the train station. Also it had turned extremely cold all of a sudden; I think they call this kind of weather “sheep’s winter”, because they need to keep their coats of wool for a while after the start of the warm season just in case. There was no heat in the radiators, and even under the covers in bed I wasn’t warm enough. I was under the weather, and entirely miserable, feeling sorry for my self. The next day I made one more effort to try and find alternative accommodation for the last month of my stay. There was one vacancy at a guest house in the center of town, which didn’t work out in the end, but when I went to take a look at it, I passed by the Jewish memorial, and felt a gush of painful tears, a deep mourning and sadness.
I am overwhelmed with the moving around, and what it entails. Researching train schedules and connections, booking tickets and reserving seats, locating destinations on maps and finding directions how to get there from the station, checking ten- and five-day weather forecasts, imagining appropriate clothes and taking others too to be on the safe side because conditions change so unpredictably in Europe, packing and re-packing, and finally checking the buses and setting the alarm for an early rise. The buses are indeed reliable, but I learn that trains are often late, which could mean missing a connection, and that they rarely draw up to the platform according to the wagon plan displayed on the platform. So much for the precision of the German railway.
