2021-07-31

Commute

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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