Chapter 1 - Farewell

Farewell

When finally the tent, sleeping bag, mat, moskito net, pan pots, food and clothes are somehow in or outside attached to my bag and thus to me for the year to come, it is already 3pm and about to rain when I take the metro to the strategically best petrol pump in Berlin. I arrive and already a couple of other hitchhikers are lingering around. 2 minutes later me and two other fellow hitchers sit in the old mercedes of Patrick, an architect who sometimes sets up villas for newly acquired russian millionaires. Then Julia, a petite blonde with an australian boyfriend who has helped emptying out the shitreservoirs of a hotel ship on the great barrier reef, drives like a mad through the heavy rain. She usually accelerates, when she feels she can’t see enough and even the stories I start narrating unobtrusively - of young people dying unexpectedly in sudden car crashes doesn’t bring our average speed down.

Angelika is on her way to pick up her 38 year old son who is too lazy to take the train despites his mother taking fulltime care of her own mother and working for BASF  from home at same time. She drops me in Stuttgart, where Southern Germany is greeting me from its sparkling side with the train full of vomiting, folkloristic songs howling, and dumb-shit-talking horny red-cheeked males and the Dirndl-clad, mindlessly giggling female counterparts. I immediately start feeling a slight impatience towards leaving the country ASAP!

Only 2.5 hours later I reach a former American military compound which now has been rebuild into posh family homes – and into a few outsider and hippie communities. When I finally push me and my oversized bag through the door I stumble into the full blast of the queer farewell party where gender is being diluted by wild clothing styles. The theme for tonite is “An unentschiedenen Tagen kann ich auch mal beides tragen”. 30 minutes later, luckily me too, am wearing a male jacket over my dress, a feather hat, thick glasses and a magic ward and finally feel less underdressed. Good-bye, Karlsruhe!