social.noyu.me

we finished that blog post just in time for what is a bit of a hikari_no_yume tradition at this point: taking the train from southern sweden to germany, lightly sleep deprived, slightly manic, and vibing out. don't worry about us, it's one of our favourite things in the world

(thankfully, all we have to do once we're in germany is to go to sleep, and we have almost an entire day tomorrow of nothing at all planned. something exciting in the evening though!)

we love the sky and all that but we also love trains (generally), Citytunneln, Öresundsbron, the entire country of Denmark if viewed as just a railway and an airport (very good at both), and we even love DB ICEs and Hamburg Hbf, especially the passenger delay compensation scheme,

and of course we love Deutschland; German was our third love when it comes to second languages, but it's still tied only with Swedish among the ones that really get to our heart (of course, Japanese is the number one, and English is our native language so it's unclassifiable)

i think we love, also, just how annoying inter-european rail transport can be, even if we also love how freakishly un-annoying it is if you live in Greater Copenhagen™ like we do, because… we interact with DB auf Deutsch and we interact with Denmark/Sweden in… Scandinavian?

DB is like an old friend that lets you down constantly but is still better than anyone else at the things they do and they clearly mean well so you can never get too mad at them. and they speak Deutsch, natürlich. so that's why we like DB

Öresundsbron our beloved

Peberholm, our favourite natural artificial nature reserve (not an oxymoron; look up the history, it's fascinating)

København H <3

btw, we are wearing an FFP3 respirator and have been for more or less this whole journey (aside from a short bus ride where we couldn't fish it out of our bag). the world has been kind to us, but we do our part to not take chances with our and others' health. you should too.

if the pandemic had completely fucked our brain, most of you would never have heard of us, it could easily have been a fate worse than death considering what we used to be like. long covid is real and can hurt you, so try to act like it if you have the chance, it's not a fun time

we would also like to point out that a lack of self-preserving instinct is a good way to injure not just yourself but also everyone in the world who cares about you. caring about yourself is in some sense equally important to caring about others around you, for many reasons

the train to Germany notionally operated by DB arrived at København H in good time, but that's not surprising because this leg of the journey is of course operated by (🎵 D, E♭, B♭ jingle plays) DSB (the notes of that jingle are » D, Es, B « in Danish)

did you know we speak multiple languages and have an interest in linguistics

we are not trying to brag about it, we're terrified of how obviously manic we were, but we will point out that if you do in fact only speak a single language, this kind of shit is an everyday occurrence for people globally, especially in smaller european countries near borders

Yamaha PSS-A50 the absolutely OP $100 (899 SEK) travel instrument

god bless USB-C, we can charge our phone and power the PSS-A50 simultaneously with the USB-C hub + charger we normally use for our laptop (alas, the PSS-A50 itself has micro-USB, to be clear)

DSB route map

nice resting point before the German border

there's „Personen in Gleis“(?!) preventing the train preceding, so enjoy this sky

(or maybe „im Gleis“, that seems more likely)

and after a brief pitstop in Hamburg, and DB removing the „Zugbindung“ because the previous train was delayed enough for us to miss the originally intended connection, we now proceed to our actual destination… Bremen, one of Germany's three city-states :3

holy shit Bremen is a real city, it has trams, with overhead wires and everything, and cool architecture. man Germany is cool. this country has real cities, and not just one or two or three or even four, it's filled with them

we love it when we suddenly end up in Half-Life 2 and this city centre, which we didn't research at all before visiting, feels like that, we're living

wow our hotel room overlooks the city centre, we could just sit here all day watching the trams and busses come and go, this rocks, visiting tiny cities rocks (we are only here for a concert for the record)

losing our collective mind at how City this place is. we thought Bremen was irrelevant, but Germany's 11th largest city feels closer to Sweden's 2nd, Gothenburg, or to Hamburg, than to the Swedish “big city” we know best, Malmö

if nobody got me i know Uludağ Gazoz got me

we are, as we half-expected, barely functioning this evening; very glad the concert isn't today, we'd be too out of it to enjoy it fully or safely. thankfully we are, uh, quite familiar with how to navigate germany at this point, and all we need to do is eat, brush teeth, sleep

Uludağ Gazoz tweet was because one of the worst things about Germany is how sugar-free sodas are far less available here, and apparently KFC only sell you either water or caffeine; caffeine would ruin our sleep AND send us psychotic, so… sugary Turkish drink from the kiosk it is

someone please tell the Germans that, not only will aspartame not kill them, but that Fanta Exotic Zero is really good, and Fanta Lemon Zero is really good, and 7-Up Free is really good, and Sprite Zero is… not bad

sometimes i want a little sweetness and fizziness in life without giving myself psychosis or diabetes, you know!!! why is germany fuckin like this

the psychosis thing is no joke by the way. your girl hikari here genuinely lost the will to live due to an excessive ingestion of caffeine a few weeks back, that made all the psychosis symptoms even worse, the total nadir of our life, saved only by us blacking out honestly

we can consume maybe a 33cL can of soda with a meal now and it won't affect us too bad but that indescribably horrible day, both the nadir and the preceding comeup, and knowing the caffeine may have worsened our bipolar, make us fear it and never want to become dependant again

germany is such a vibe. paying with cash… kiosks… DB trains… public transit other than busses and regional trains… it's so cool. and i think i might like it more when it's not berlin, which may be quite telling. would've been interesting if we had moved to köln after all…

oh huh when did we become less psychotic again. that's good. maybe swimming in the germanness is grounding us again. pleasant

Bremen city centre viewed from a 4th-storey hotel room window, intentionally out of focus for the privacy of pedestrians

(rare twitter link because we hit some kind of limit and can't upload the video here: https://x.com/hikari_no_yume/status/1960098400285720898)

that's the prettiest video we've ever shot, isn't it. that's just a phone camera, too

the PSS-A50 really is too much fun to jam on, we're going to have to turn it off if we want to sleep, the ability to just play a pleasing sequence of notes using an arpeggio pattern, hold it, and then noodle on top with a totally different instrument never gets old

seems like we have slept well!!! :)

Guten Morgen, Bremen!

germany rocks so hard dude. this is not just a photo of a croissant, an apple pastry, some kind of Laugengebäck sesame seed tomato mozarella thing, and Apfelschorle… it is that, but you see, this store has maybe a dozen variations on each of these items (except the Schorle)!!!!

the germans are VERY serious about their baked goods and they are VERY good at them, a single german bakery has more variety of Laugengebäck in it than the average Englishman has tasted in his life, it's peak. oh and btw like half the stores in Berlin have 12 different Schorle :)

we are obviously a little manic and vulnerable to grass-is-greener syndrome, but considering that we did already get disillusioned enough with germany to decide not to live here… when the Fehmarn Belt tunnel is done, we will be making more frequent visits, i'm sure :)

i think we fundamentally do not like living in a world city, be it London or Berlin or whatever, it's somehow very closed-minded and too manic. but despite what people will tell you, every country is full of wonderful smaller cities, places with much better balance

everything about this place makes us very happy and we have explored almost none of it so far. remember how our hotel room overlooks the very city centre we love so much, it's literally next to the train station? that's a budget hotel, 2-night stay with incredible view is €113?!

if we did end up in Japan (unlikely at this point), we realise now it would be very out-of-character to just go straight to Tokyo. maybe we'd hang out in the inaka. i think that'd be very soulful for us. maybe we actually will do that some day, who knows. if it's even possible

[oops forgot to cross-post this one, it should be before the Tokyo one] nobody who isn't German has really heard of or cares about Bremen, but it seems really nice, it's making us happy in all the ways anywhere else in Germany does, for our two-night stay (which could've been way cheaper we suspect!), and that's all that matters

a thing you should understand about hikari_no_yume, though, is that for as long as life is kind to her, she would find almost any environment soulful, it feels like that

you can't see them in this shot, but there's often a cyclist passing through here, in the shade of the trees, in front of that brick building, a few times a minute. but it's very peaceful here. it's wonderful

wandering a city, any city, any size, any part, on a quiet day, or a quiet night, really is our favourite thing in the entire world. it's a kind of de-pluraling activity because it's so “hikari” in some sense, but of the rare kind that puts us at ease, it's so calming

Bremen's city centre has some kind of elevated railway line, too, which really makes it feel kinda like Tokyo, specifically a section near Akihabara that we spent a long time walking back and forth through when we visited late-2018 (we spent a month hunting CDs and anime merch)

the world really is a beautiful thing sometimes

someone please tell the germans how to design toilets that don't make our legs fall asleep owwwwww god it was worse in berlin but still

hotel room PSS-A50 jam [2 hours ago]

there's so much the PSS-A50 can do man, and we're not even putting its best foot forward here!

love the quiet train station ambience

half the train stations in europe look exactly like this but that doesn't mean we love them any less for it, this is our favourite type of place in the whole world

(sehr lecker) currywurst on an ICE. peak germany i fear

wait this isn't even an ICE it's the EC to København!

home <3

@hikari ye, the Good Shit

@hikari Oh I'm jealous

@hikari wonder what you'll think of visiting "Hong Kong, the non-touristy bits"

compare and contrast Central/Tsim Sha Tsui vs areas like Tuen Mun vs places like Ha Tsuen

@hikari The thing that struck me when I first changed trains at Köln Hbf is that there are eight different bakeries there. Here you’re lucky if you get a Greggs rather than just a Costa where you can pay £3 for a stale croissant.

@h0m54r yeah. everywhere we've been in germany is seemingly like this to some extent, too. granted, we've only really visited the the north and north-east of this country (they're more easily accessible by train from southern sweden)

@h0m54r @hikari otoh as a German everytime I come back from the UK I'm sad German bakeries etc haven't adopted UK-style pies yet. Much better savory travel food than what goes for a sandwich here.

@hikari Köln is nice! The Rhineland is overall a very chill place ime.

@hikari I found Catholic Germany and Protestant Germany to really be two different places, and my favorite cities in each were Köln and Hamburg.

@hikari Uludağ Gazoz my belovèd
trying to find some here led me to find a nice little Turkish grocery