Volume 2, Days 82-83
To move on the next city Augsburg, which isn’t very far from Munich, presented something of a challenge. I suppose it is too close to Munich for there to be any Flixbuses offering a route (even as a leg of a longer stretch) and a cursory check of train prices some days back left one panting for breath.
As I enjoyed a fairly leisurely morning with an entire dorm room to myself, it was time to get serious about Blablacar, a carpooling platform. I registered for an account and found someone driving that way from around 1 pm. That left me with too little time for a stroll in the English Gardens, but plenty of time to catch up on work.
The hostel had a fairly early checkout time of 10am, which put a cramp in my style when I suddenly remembered I had a collection of empty bottles I needed to run to the recycling point. That left me just enough time to drink a cup of coffee and head downstairs, where I put my suitcase in storage and plopped down on a couch to keep working.
Unfortunately, my request for a ride automatically timed out after about an hour, so the Blablacar fell through. I knew I couldn’t check in at the next hostel until 3 pm, so I wasn’t in any particular rush to get out of the hostel, other than one trip to a supermarket to grab a salad and a new flavor of Rittersport bar (brownie…not very good).
Well, I was stuck with the train after all, and I suddenly realized how dire my suitcase situation is. A lot of plastic from the undercarriage was been worn away over the past couple weeks when I decided to stop worrying about “fixing” the wheels and just letting it go on the raw plastic wheel cores. Well, I’m down to about two weeks and this suitcase isn’t going to do much rolling about. Because of that, I shelled out the money (probably unnecessarily) to catch a bus to the train station, where I paid an exorbitant rate for the local commuter train. Seriously, this kind of train would cost no more than 600 yen in Japan, but 15 effing Euros in Germany. It seems each train I take gets more expensive than the last, even though the distances I cover are shorter and shorter. The worst part was no one checked my ticket. That’s 30 euros so far that I could have saved by not buying a ticket, compared with a what 50 euro fine… The expected value of train hopping might be positive.
Grumbling over the insane amount of transportation costs incurred so far, I hauled my luggage the 1.something kilometers from the train station to the hostel. It was not a fun walk and it was unpleasantly warm in the afternoon sun. I checked into a modern looking cafe that serves as the office of this building which is a combination hostel, hotel, and apartment. Weird.
The rooms were spacious with full sized lockers and those weird double size bunkbeds (double on bottom, single on top). Good for me that I was assigned a bottom bunk, but sucks to be stuck with a top bunk. There was one guy in the room taking a nap and this being Augsburg, I wasn’t expecting much of a crowd.
I walked a block over to the main square to find a supermarket and get a bottle of water. Unfortunately, the Rewe didn’t stock their “Ja!” brand cheap mineral water, so it was still cheaper to buy (sugar free) lemonade than another brand of mineral water. I grabbed a pastry from a bakery and headed back to the hostel where I ordered an espresso and sat around for about an hour.
I puttered around most of the day until this scary looking Eastern European guy came into the room. He was angry with me for taking “his” bed (even though it was assigned to me) and muttered in Russian or Albanian or something. I figured it was time to head out and find a “real” supermarket, and walked some distance to comparison shop a Norma, Edeka, and Aldi. I am quite the connoisseur of German supermarkets.
Regarding the hostel, the one thing I had been looking forward to was an impressive kitchen. However, it seems they decided to get rid of the kitchen in order to have more bedrooms. In place of a full kitchen, there was a “kitchenette” with two mini-fridges, a tea kettle, and a microwave. That was certainly a real disappointment. Taking this in mind, I bought a microwave meal and returned to eat it in the room, where a table and chairs were helpfully provided.
I chatted with the Indian guy who had been napping when I first arrived. He was in town for a job interview, and spent a good chunk of the evening studying (as best I could tell) copying sentences from Google translate by hand.
I enjoyed a quiet evening, watching two episodes of Babylon Berlin and reading a few pages of “Rabbit, Run,” which I picked up from the library in Frankfurt but have barely looked at.
| Pfand return – apple pastry | -1.14 |
| pre-mixed salad and choc. | 4.08 |
| Bus | 1.5 |
| Train | 15.3 |
| Hostel (2 nights) | 38 |
| Lemonade | 0.64 |
| Mohnschenke | 1.6 |
| Espresso | 1.6 |
| Aldi | 3.96 |
| Total: | 65.54 EUR (511.2 RMB) (USD 71.37) |
Running Total: 30201 RMB (USD 4216.66)
Daily Average: 368.3 RMB (USD 51.42)