My playlist takes
me to journeys
made, places seen,
and then... Fernweh
kicks in. Hard.
Good I'm on a high-speed train.

Fernweh. I love that word. It's, as you can probably see, a German word. Literally translated it would be "faraway pain". Yes, that is precisely the oposite of being homesick. It's a bit stronger than wanderlust. I can have sudden bouts of this. Of Fernweh. Especially when I'm at one of the Paris Grand Gares, the Grand Stations of Paris. They breathe the adventure of travel, of exploring, of discovering new frontiers. If I'm at the Gare de Lyon, walk past the Gare St Lazare, or change at the Gare du Nord, I feel it strongly: Fernweh.

I love listening to music. Now, that's quite easy, with a phone streaming basically anything you want to hear on the platform of your choice. But it wasn't always like that. Once we had walkmans. With 90 minute cassette tapes, if we were lucky on auto-reverse. Then came cd players. But it really got good with the mp3-players, of which the iPod, of course, was the queen. I still have several of those, and my favorite one, one that can hold about 120 Gigs of music, still works. And I still use it, as I have used it on many trips. From commutes to faraway vacations. There's a playlist on that thing, with some of my favorite tunes. Everytime I play it, it takes me back to so many of these journeys.

The other day, I was at the Gare du Nord in Paris, and I was listening to the music from that playlist on that iPod. It amplified that feeling of Fernweh. Fortunately, I was at the Gare du Nord to take a high-speed train and cross the channel. A short but sweet trip to soothe the faraway pain.

What do you listen to when you travel?

The poem above is a highku, a form I created inspired by the haiku & the higher movement on Farcaster.

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I am clearly not the only one getting Fernweh at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Enjoy this song by Barbara: