train journey, copied from the diary, 04th August 2006:
Earlier, I got the backpack down from the top of the wardrobe, it felt good to pack again, even if it's only for a week. I'm on the train on my way to the "
attac summer academy" in Karlsruhe in the south of Germany. My hometown Berlin is in the north east, so I'll have to travel across the whole country.
I'm watching the golden green landscape rushing by and I'm astonished by how much empty space there is. You never see a single soul!
Maybe my comparisons are a bit laughable since the last country that I travelled by train was Bangladesh ;)
The lush green landscape was spotted with colourfully dressed men and women working in the fields. There were cows and sheep and deer and birds....
Here, everything is done by machines, all I see is cropped fields without a single human hint.
I recall how strange Germany looks from above, from the sky. It's split into thousands of rectangles in different sizes. Every centimetre of earth and soil has an owner here, there's harldy anything left that belongs to no one or to all of us.
Earlier, the train left Berlin from the fancy new Central Station and just minutes later passed through the old station. The old station was where people hugged their loved ones, where I waited for my friends, where I picked up my visitors. Now the InterCityExpress just passes the station withing a few seconds and it looks shabby, grey and abandoned. Although I never especially liked that station, I feel sorry for it. At least it had history and character, other than that fancy shopping mall-look-a-like glass palace that we now have at Anhalter/ Central Station.
----later----
Wow, after hours of empy fields I've finally seen some cows. Germany's subsidised agriculture seems to work without heavy usage of humans or animals....
Everything is being taken care by machines.