Day 15+16: Kinders…!

So despite my little beer happiness the night before I got up at 8 in the mornig determined to do my bus tour. So I went to town but the unpleasant feeling that creeped up my feet at the trainstop did tell my that it wasn’t that much warmer that the day before. Therefore the bus wasn’t operating – again. I wanted to go to Jamba Fruit (not Sparabo – I wonder if those two are related) for breakfast since they serve porridge. But the tell me unfortunately they just ran out of porridge. The next place had porridge but no coffee or tea. Dunkin Donughts had coffee and a surprisingly good one.

So with a belly full of warm porridge I made my way over tho Milenium Park which has an open air stage by Frank Gehry which I didn’t really like. It seemed a little expectable… But Anish Kapoor’s polished metal sculpture is really something.

The I already had to run home to gather my stuff, say goodbye to Hanna’s and Avis flat and run off with pulling my suitcase behind me through piles of snow for 5 blocks. Quite a funny sight I imagine. Passing by ‘Altgeld St’ I reach Britta’s house where I am supposed to leave the keys. Once I get there I have to refrain from my original plan to put the key in Britta’s mail box. Because

1. I can’t get into the house to the mail boxes since no one is home.

2. Even if – you need a key to open the mailbox.

So much for the great plan. Hm. Hm…..Hm.

The door is framed by to really high walls with concrete decorative vases on top. I end up climbing up there and hiding the key in one of the vases. With pangs of remorse I make my way to the train station. Hanna and Avi took such good care of me and I just abandon their key at the most random place…

I rush into the train station just to find out that: A delay does feel a lot longer when you are kept under the impression you are just about to leave – for 23 hours.

Really that’s what happened. You even ran to get a coffee upstairs because I was afraid to miss the train.

But I met a very nice a) lady who agreed with me that American football was stupid and ‘a man thang’ (I loved her!), a lawyer who shared had the nasty habbit with a lot of American men to talk louder and louder in order to talk you down untill everybody in the waiting room was informed that I was German, Germans were great engineers and were basically the Japanese of Europe (needed to make an exit there…) and finally smart Brandon - a 24 year old painter and art teacher. We shared my cigarettes and his vodka and grapefruit juice supplies. Great companion.

At 4 in the mornig an anouncement woke me from a short nap on the dirty carpet (the waiting room felt like a desaster area shelter by then with all the trash and the crying babies…) ‘to inform all passengers of the Empire Builder to Seattle that the train has reached the station but unfortunately the toilets are frozen’. At 6 in the morning we boarded the train. When I awoke at 9 – we still hadn’t left.

At 1.30 the train started moving anouncing that ‘it was actually early if it wasn’t a day late.’

9 hours later Alison pics me up from the station and brings me home to the family mansion on a former Xmas tree plantation. We hop in the ouside hot tub surrounded by Tannenbäumen – before passing out.