…continued from Hammock Adventures:

I ramble into the Peggau train station about fifteen minutes after an hourly train back to Graz had come. No matter, I think to myself. I’ve got €2,70 in sole €0,20 coin increments rattling around my pocket. That’s enough for a coffee or beer or something in a cozy pub.

I walk a bit, still splashing in the puddles, and come across “Cafe Andrea” with an illuminated Putingamer sign. I open the door, and am completely surprised.

It’s a small pub, maybe twice the size of an average living room. There is only one occupied table of five, old gents, and a beautifully plump smiling woman is behind the bar wiping glasses with a microfiber towel. Everyone is laughing; the from-the-gut kind of laughter that crinkles the eyes in such a way as to cause momentary blindness.

The rain has added a secondary level of complete perfection to this scene: the filtered light from the clouds shrouded the pub in a haze of warmth and security.

As I open the door I am greeted with huge smiles and the attention of all. The woman raises her palm in greeting and unleashes a string of Austrian-dialect German, to which I laugh, surprisingly confident and secure in this moment, and sing back: “auf Englisch, bitte?”

This comment unleashes a torrent of room-wide bellows, the older gents slapping each other on the back and echoing “auf Englisch! Auf Englisch!” They gesture for me to tuck in and join their table, and I do with absolute ease.

Their level of english mirrors my level of german to create this beautiful parallelism and nonjudgement. We all introduce ourselves and Andrea–the woman behind the bar–squeezes in next to me, handing me a fresh frosty beer. It tastes amazing paired with my still-pulsing muscles.

For about three hours the seven of us laugh and speak in broken-German/broken-English; they let me practice conjugating schlafen and bear with patience and sneaky grins as I try to remember vocabulary terms.

I definitely learn more German than I have ever learned in a Thursday afternoon Deutschkurs.

Manfred buys my drink for me and I find myself making plans to meet up with the group again on Saturday, same time. With an overwhelming sense of lightness, I skip back to the train station.

When I arrive at the station, my watch reads 20:41 and I compare that to the “20:36” of the train schedule. Before any realizations set in, I look to my left and see the train to Graz barreling down the track, an unfortunate “5 minutes delayed”.

Universe. You cheeky bastard.

I munch on a pretzel for my rainy walk home from the Graz Hbf and after jolly warm shower, make homemade veggie ramen noodle soup and attempt to process the day.

But I can’t, because all that is going around and around in my head is:

What just happened.

Have a hammock adventure as much as possible, friends.