Berlin - Day 1

I left the house at three fourty-two this morning, looking back on a very sleepless night. I was incredibly foul-mooded, but on the way to the bus stop I tried to think positively and acknowledged the fact that it was not raining. I looked up in the sky and saw a beautiful nothing, because of the dirt-yellow lantern lights, and because the air in the city is so polluted. I'm not sure what exactly I was looking for, but for some reason I knew that I didn't find it.

When I looked back on the street I found something else instead. Something shiny red. I found the illuminated back light of the bus that I had to take, the twenty-four night bus to Pimlico. It had stopped at the traffic lights ahead of me, about eighty metres up the street. From there it was another two hundred metres to the stop. Fuck, I thought, that's two football fields. My bag was heavy, because I was allowed only one piece of hand luggage, and yet I started calculating. 

If I start running right now, while the bus is still stuck at the lights, I could probably run up the street, catch up with the bus and run pass the red lights, across the street, past the coffee shop, past the mini cab station, around the corner, past the newspaper stand, past the underground station, past the first wrong bus stop, past the restaurant I always wanted to try, past the second wrong bus stop, and reach the right bus stop before the bus got there. 

That thought process took me less than a second, less than the time that I needed to tighten the grip on my bag, less than the time that I needed to build up a turbo boost running position, less than, and that's when I saw the lights switch from red to yellow, saw how the bus was around the corner even before they were properly green. It took me several steps to give up my turbo boost running position, and many more to loosen the grip on my bag.

It wasn't too bad, though. I reached the bus stop alright and watched only six other buses drive by before the next twenty-four arrived. I wasn't alone either. There was a drunk grandpa who I thought was too old to pull off a ponytail, and a group of drunk kids who I thought were too old to play air-basketball. To me they looked idiotic, all of them. But hey, who am I to talk. I wasn't even drunk. Anyway, that's how this journey began, at three fourty-two in the morning.