For the first time in ten years I swam in a swimming pool. A strange urge I confess. I saw a fork of ligtening and immediately remembered every fork of lightening I have ever seen, for they are very few. I walk the medieval streets and lose myself blissfuly among a dusty pile of vinyl.
I arrived in Freiburg long before I found the hostel I was planning to sleep in. The city is a spread out tram friendly, cyclist filled, country city often sited as one of the greenest cities in Germany, which makes it one of the greenest cities in europe; all passive housing, healthy outdoor lifestyles and allotments. It also means that its quite wide and the Youth Hostel ‘in’ Freiburg is pretty much out the other side of the city, alongide the wide plains of the river that ploughs the city, one of those shallow fast flowing mountain jobs, clear as crystal and icy cold. But its hot today, really hot and my pack aches at my shoudlers as I walk 7km across town, from one edge to other. The river runs through the heart of the city the highway running either side of it in a quirky set up. Trendy bars have gardens full of trendy healthy Germans, stretches of the river almost feel like East London, somehow.
I stay here for three days, sleeping mainly, occasional attempts at speaking German are made but they don’t really get very far. Its hard to muster the enthusiasm and energy to do it as I’m only in the country for a few days really. On the foolish front I don’t take any photographs at all, I buy a pair of vintage shoes for 15euros, on the basis that they would cost me about £50 in London, and then I find the towns record shop, late on a Saturday afternoon. The double LP I buy (a 1959 recording of a conference hosted by Yves Klein in Paris limited to 500 copies) has to accompany me for the next 90km until I reach Switzerland and an open post office.
- Camping after record shopping in Freiburg
Freiburg is one of the greenest cities in Germany, trams trace their lines through the city on grassy beds, old cobbles line the streets and new build passive housing springs up everywhere. The city itself is built on thin flat sections between sudden sharp peaks that form the black forest, and every day, fork lightening strikes the streets, the heavy rains cause the shallow river to take on swift personality changes and I soak myself in the warm storm whilst cycling to the swimming pool. In this humidity I heal my blisters and sleep in a room with 20 other people, or barely sleep. I try and make notes but by now, by here, I am very detatched from this process, very tired of documenting it, I just want to do it for a while, without having to think how I will later account for every second. And so I probably miss some things, there is no documentation of my shirt, slick and dripping, or the bike I rode around on, no evidence of my attempts at speaking German, no documentation of the sense of panic when I struggled to find somewhere to convert my final travellers cheque into cash, no documentation of a conversation I had with an elderly lady in the forest the day I walked out of town.
I left on a sunday, morning sunlight, double LP squashed into my rucksack, and walked south out of town and straight into the forest, thick black eaves, dense foliage, along an arborial path that every now and then labelled the tree with its latin and germanic name, the forest busy with people. Nordic walkers, young runners, elderly couples, dog walkers, a large bunch of people doing some sort of dance with sticks, all kinds of energetic healthy people. Only the size of my pack and my inability to speak German really picked me out. The path wove up into the woodland, signposts poking off here and there, up and down, everynow and then the path became a forest track thick with pine needles patterned like ripples on the sea floor from the recent thunderous downpours. My boots occasionally vanished under thick mud. The Germans, unlike the french, do not talk to strangers whilst walking, in fact they seem strongly to ignore you, as though you are ruining their attempts at solitude as they are ruining yours.
Freiburg, just outside Freiburg
bramthomasarnold
