Sleepy observations

This is a story about something that happened last summer, at a time when I was running on a lot less sleep than usual:
It was the evening of a day I had spent running lots of errands, trying hard to not get lost on the way and to avoid bare-faced strangers who were looking for conversation. I was standing at an unfamiliar train station, blankly watching the strip of evening sky between an ugly building and the station roof change colors. I barely paid attention to the podcast I was listening to, partly because I didn’t have my coat and it was getting chilly, partly because I was thinking about whether I’d make my next appointment – with Berlin public transport being so unreliable, especially during the evening rush hour. While I was standing there, lost in thought, a train approached the platform. After a glance at the information board to confirm that it wasn’t the one I had to take, my gaze found the train windows that were passing by me at a decreasing speed until I could make out individual passengers. When I realized that they were all wearing masks, I was genuinely shocked. The thought that this train full of incognito criminals would soon open its doors and thus remove the barrier between us worried me. Only then did I remember that we were in a pandemic and that wearing a mask on public transport is mandated, which meant that all those apparent criminals were everyday heroes. As I continued to gaze at the windows that were now slowly gaining speed as they passed by me, I was shocked at how exhausted I must have been at that moment and decided to get some much-needed rest after that last appointment. I should definitely stop making fun of the duck’s numerous Christmas market and cookie daydreams after this embarrassing incident that, hopefully, didn’t show in the tiny bare section of my tired face because, yes, I had forgotten that I was wearing a mask myself. I would have been one of the criminals.

Mates on a train

Last weekend the duck and I took a tram for the first time in over a month. We knew that the Berlin public transport experience would change due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the relative emptiness and calmness we got to experience throughout our ride was still shocking. See, in Tokyo the duck and my main worry was figuring out how to increase our chances of landing a seat; in Berlin we do enjoy seated travel, but we appreciate a relatively steady noise level that allows us to read or get some studying done even more. If we sit around groups of people who know each other (mates, if you will), or someone who has a long debate over the phone, it can be hard to concentrate on a book or new vocabulary. Often those conversations are so lively and loud that we can’t help but listen in and thus broaden our understanding of the human condition (ha! That’s what we’ll call being unintentionally nosy from now on). After a year of witnessing Berlin public transport discussions, most of them interesting, some uncomfortable, the duck and I feel like we know the people of this city.
While we do enjoy the occasional caught conversation, we still prefer being somewhat productive during our commutes. This is why, once we have to take trains more often again, we will continue to look for seats near book-reading or headphone-music-listening solo travelers rather than mates on a train (we tried; we failed; we’re too lazy to change the title).
Now that face masks are mandatory on public transport (I never expected to see masked riders in Berlin), the duck and I have found a new thing to look out for to avoid all those exciting train discourses: people who sport makeshift masks! It seems to us that those folded bandana/former t-shirt/no-sew masks have a tendency to muffle speech more than the store-bought single-use or sewed varieties. Where do you think scarves fall on the muffled-speech-through-mask spectrum?
We’ll go back to folding some more ugly, uneven no-sew masks for our muffled-sound-collection now. Please stay safe and considerate (and hopefully somewhat cheerful despite the uncertainty), everyone!