Bun or Bus?

The day of all days

And so came the day of days, the bun or bus day, the day Philipp and I were to seize (before millennials made it a mass motto) and mark as the beginning of our world conquest. As a crisp red dawn broke on our red-letter day, we rose to perform our usual morning ablutions, this time accompanied by that unusual feeling you get every time you are about to do something “for the last time for a while” (which in our case was, for example, the trivial but comforting convenience of using our own shower).

Restlessly counting the minutes, we got down to our grandma’s for breakfast. No sooner had we made it to minute 35 out of 500,000 and sat down at the breakfast table, however, than our glorious conquest of worlds unknown within and without, our steeping into foreign cultures and bonding with faraway peoples, our trip of a lifetime tripped and nearly failed – all because we couldn’t answer the bun question. What’s that again, you ask?

Bun or bus?

You see, our grandma is the quintessence of care and holder of all traits that make grandmas such a treasure. Sometimes, though, her priorities diverge from ours. So when we got to her place, hearts and heads euphoric and heavily laden with contradicting feelings and thoughts, she welcomed us with a rifle of questions: What kind of sandwiches did we want to take? Which kind of bun? Sausage? Cheese? Butter? No butter? Considering we would enjoy these sandwiches for about half a day and then have to run afield for carrion on our own for the next 300 days, considering our brains were full of adrenaline, considering we still hadn’t received our visa-embossed passports back, we couldn’t care less about salami or pastrami.

So after our disregard erupted one too many times in Philipp’s impatient “We really don’t care!”, grandma snapped harshly, “Then you can’t leave. It’s the little decisions that make the big differences in life and if you can’t make them, you won’t make it, in travel or life. I’m almost 90 years old and I know. If you can’t clarify what food you want to take, you can’t go!” And clarify culinary questions we did, for the next few hours on the train, while savoring grandma’s sandwiches.

Finally: On our way

We took a local bus to the train station. Not that we couldn’t find somebody to take us – we had easily amassed at least a dozen offers - but that convenient notion undermined our mission. See, we were to embark on a journey from our birth place and half around the globe to China by using public transportation exclusively, which qualified any help as cheating. So, lazy as we were and prosaic as it sounded, our first steps were taken in the direction of a bus stop.

The very last temporary ta-ras were exchanged at 7:03 AM at the bus stop with Michael, a friend with whom I’d so extensively planned a similar feat but I’d never found the time or occasion to do it. (Hope’s the thing with feathers to this day, Michael!)

A most peculiar feeling consumed us on the bus, one of calm and composure amidst all the excitement. To bear testimony to this serenity, our conversation never rambled off the tangents of “Hey, it’s cool that we are doing this together!” – “Yeah, I think so!”. (If you continue reading from here on, you will soon realise that most of our talks are grounded in this philosophy of conversational simplicity. We just don’t need a lot of words.) We were on our way to Bratislava.