2021-07-31

Commute

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This week I changed my commute from "car all the way" to "car to the train station". For almost 280 days (since middle of October 2020) I went by car in order to avoid other people and hopefully not catch a SARS-COV2 aka. Covid19 infection. Thankfully I managed to avoid an infection and I did receive my second dose of Biontech vaccine two weeks ago. So I decided to give the train a try.

• I decided to take the express from the other station near my home --- except the express isn't operating normally due to three construction sites along its regular route. But it does save a handful of stops nonetheless.

• Due to local vacation time there are only few passengers on the trains.

• I got to ride on new shiny trains --- more aptly called fridges-on-wheels.

• I had forgotten many details of the train schedule, but I managed to get to my desk and back home, too!

• It takes twice the time (approx. 3 hours per day) but the ticket for 12 months is about a quarter of the cost by car, if I sum up 0.3 Eu/km. The distance is 35 km one way.

• I forgot that along the way there are several bakeries making my way home somewhat challenging --- you guessed it, I should stay clear of bakeries almost always :-)

• Easy and daily access to a good newspaper/magazine stand is back, which I missed somewhat.

• I also have easy daily access to a postal pickup station (Packstation). Not so important any more, since my wife has changed to full time home office.

• The second hand music store (vinyl and compact discs) is close to one train station.

• I reinstalled my trusty Acer subnotebook in order to have something to write (emacs) and read (emacs/nov-mode for epub and zathura for pdf files). I installed Debian 11 and I changed from i3 to sway for the fun. I also installed rustc to fiddle with a little. I'm afraid that this will come up sooner or later, although I honestly refuse to believe that rust is the answer to all questions computing. But that is a different adventure.

All in all it's a mixed bag of feelings, however, I expect the feeling of "normal" come back to some extent over the next weeks.

I haven't tried the "bicycle to the train station" thing yet, but I shall try that again soonish.

I have not yet met any of my commute aquaintances :-)

So, fellow commuters, have the appropriate amount of fun!

Cheers,

~ew

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