Getting there

By: Patricia Hernández Rodríguez

An illustration by the author of her commute.

Lately I find myself partaking more and more in one of my favorite activities: complaining about public transport. My closest friends would argue that complaining about such a topic is almost a talent of mine, mostly due to my long list of commuting experiences. For exactly 15 years, I have been doing the same remarkable task of getting into communal passenger vehicles and riding along for up to seventy-minute intervals at a time.

It started out in the first grade, on the school bus. There, I mastered the arts of dodging paper planes, napping regardless of the noise and memorizing the unspoken seating arrangements to avoid accidentally sitting in Elisa’s seat, an act sure to provoke her and her friend Amanda’s eye-rolling habit. Later I graduated to the bright-green public transit, and oddly enough, the same rules would apply: the air conditioning also didn’t reach the back of the vehicle, the Amandas still saved spots for Elisas by leaving their bags on the adjacent seat. In both cases, the journey was as aggravating as time-consuming: seventy minutes of clattering through the pothole-filled side-roads of my hometown Tegueste and struggling through the perpetual traffic of the roundabout of Padre Anchieta, to finally rush down the highway via Santa Cruz. Now that I am at university, this daily trip has gotten somewhat shorter, but I still have to factor in the fifteen-to-twenty minute stretch of walking along the blue overhead bridges to Campus Guajara.

I have avoided doing the math so far (knowing that the results would most likely upset me), but a few weeks ago, standing by the bus stop amid the stupor of refreshing the Titsa app and seeing yet another delay, I determined that my travels roughly amounted to a staggering 338 days, an almost full year of my admittedly short-21-year-old life spent commuting. These figures then triggered a desperate need for productivity, one which I tend to feel sporadically during my daily journeys to school. As the bus began to pull to the curb and I reached for the wallet in my pocket, I reminded myself of the array of tasks that could easily be performed mid-commute: reading is often first on the list, preferably with a physical book, which my eyes would welcome as well-needed rest from hours of blue-screen exposure, not to mention the irresistible yet admittedly pretentious appeal that reading an obscure paperback has to literature undergrads like me. For convenience sake, phone-related chores could also be considered: catching up with friends, replying to emails, checking the news. The risks of endless social-media scrolling, however, are in this case through the roof, and I frequently find myself indulging in this. Who can blame me, especially on my way home after a lecture-packed day? Enough with the close readings and the syntactic parsing, give me some quick, vapid entertainment. And so it is in this way that I end up spending most of my travels: wasting my time and adding to my budding headache.

I feel the same frustration towards protracted bus trips on the way home with friends from uni. We dream of magically appearing in our homes after a long day of school, spawning randomly in our desired destination, just as you would in a video game. We crave this ability to abridge the mind-numbing transition from one place to another and cut right to the chase.

When I found out that I would also need to use public transport and travel long distances on the daily in Berlin, I was justifiably annoyed. Last March I moved to the capital of Germany to attend FU Berlin for a semester. I was excited, but mostly scared: I had never lived on my own and had never lived in a country whose language wasn’t my mother tongue (let alone I could only speak it at a semi-okayish level). There were changes. Big changes. I found myself overwhelmed, meeting more people in a span of days than I had done all my life, going to big places to carry out big tasks that I feared were bigger than myself. I was suffering what I now term the “island complex”: It’s not that going to the Bürgeramt to get my residence permit was a bewildering task, or that deciphering the TV Tax letters written in German legalese was that particularly difficult (as if we didn’t have DeepL to help). In retrospect, not even the daunting submission of my final papers on American Literature deserved as much stress. But like the speck on the globe that was Tenerife when I opened up Google Maps to show my confused interlocutor the place from Spain that I was from (“It’s not Madrid, it’s not Barcelona, it’s somewhere… different, down below”), I felt I was utterly small. This smallness became more apparent in conversations with other international students: coming all the way from Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, Hanoi, Oslo and São Paulo, they were used to eight-story central stations, double-decker buses, the frantic pace of passengers speeding along Hauptbahnhof to catch a fast train to get to other side of the country in less than four hours.

I wasn’t aware of the island complex yet. In the meantime, what slowed down the tempo was the following thought: before going to the colossal lecture halls at FUB or doing that monologue in front of a class full of native Germans, I always had to get there first. I always had to catch the bus, or the S-Bahn, or the U-Bahn, or the regional train. There was always an hour of nothingness in between each of these—in my eyes—earth-shattering events. My first hours of nothingness would be spent staring at the placards plastered on the train wagon walls, deciphering the rubbed-off graffiti on the window corners, overhearing conversations and despairing at how little I made of them, wondering about the amber liquid inside the clear bottles that absolutely every German teenager would carry in their hand (“It can’t be beer”, I remember thinking). I struggled to remember when exactly, but the messages on the placards finally started making sense. I was able to pick out words in conversations beyond “genau”and “echt”. I managed to follow what they were saying, not only because I understood it, but because I had experienced it, too: A few girls groaning about the breakdown of the S1 train the day before, which had forced me to get down in Yorckstraße and catch two U-Bahn connections to Zoologischer Garten. A heated argument about where to find the best Döner in Berlin (the food truck at Mehringdamm, of course). A group of guys that couldn’t choose the best supermarket to leave their Pfand bottles at (I silently agreed with the guy who insisted on avoiding Aldi). A pair who was looking for the closest Späti. Sitting down on the worn leather seats of the underground train, I witnessed all of this calmly, sipping on the widely-beloved amber beverage that I had later come to identify as a high caffeine iced-tea, Club-Mate (mystery solved).

I have tried to pinpoint the exact event that made it all click, the precise moment in which all of the pieces came together in my brain to adapt to my changing environment. Only in hindsight do I realize that this could not have happened out of the blue: it was a slow shift, a shift that was made out of the earth-shattering events but most importantly, of the many, many hours of the alleged nothingness in-between.

On a recent phone call to my former roommate and good friend Hana, I complained about the pointlessness of our knowledge of Berlin’s public transit system. We had both amassed an incalculable amount of BVG trivia which served no purpose in her new home at Western Germany, not to mention mine in Tenerife. Deep down, I knew my complaints were not entirely true. My almost daily trips from my temporary home in peaceful Schlachtensee to the hip neighborhoods at Neukölln and Kreuzberg made me fluent in the “day-to-day” language of Berlin: with its Spätis, Club-mates, Kiezs, Brötchens, Wegbiers, Döners. These small, peculiar details awarded me with a sense of deep belonging that I know will never leave me.

So on days like these, when the journey is taking forever and the time wasted seems too great, I sit back, close my eyes, and I try to enjoy the ride.