Travelling from Maastricht to my hometown Munich can be somewhat of an Odyssey. It easily takes up to 10 hours or more, at least, if you travel at short notice and cannot afford the regular price for the fast train, which is about 130 EUR one-way. When going home for the Carnival holidays I made the same old mistake again, deciding last second to go to Munich, spending almost one day in four different trains. Of course, I wanted to use the time as productive as possible and brought some readings for University that had been lying around in my room for weeks, where I had successfully ignored them.
It was an irony in itself that the texts I had to study were about mobility and the new sense of speed that modern societies have, due to the acceleration of travelling. Well, my personal travel could have used a speed up!
Anyhow, there was one sentence that made me think: “The time spent on the journey itself is not necessarily wasted, as the passenger experiences the countryside he passes through, moving from one place to another.”
I looked around and tried to find this particular passenger, enjoying the landscape, the author was describing. But the people around me were either sleeping, or reading a book, typing on their laptops or using their mobile phones. None of them bothered to look out of the window. I myself had been trying to fill up the hours with work, not using one minute to actually think about the peculiar process I was in.
Not only was I moving between two cities, thereby crossing whole of Germany, but I was also shifting between two lives. My personal environment in Maastricht is very different from the one in Munich, but still, I remain the same person, when moving between the two places. That is what I thought. But do I really remain the same, or do I secretly change on the way, unnoticed by myself? Is there a Maastricht version of myself and a Munich version and do I leave parts of each respective identity behind when I travel? As soon as this thinking process had begun, I did not feel any more that the journey was long. Actually, it was too short to grasp what really happens if you travel between places that mean something to you. Next time, I will try to look out of the window all the time, thereby feeling every meter I go away from Maastricht and closer to Munich and I will try to find out what it feels like.