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it's not really a big, long one.
The main motto for my tying experience was: No stress. Just go with what you have energy for.
I had worked a lot the week before, was feeling a bit too anti-social to organise an event myself, couldn't convince a friend to organise it either - what wonder. Sunday around 6 p.m. I got back into town, completely knackered, but higly spirited from a training weekend about the "Qur'an and how to interprete it" and long long talks with the Muslim theology professor which was really good "tying", he presented a very modern, scientific way of dealing with the Qu'ran, and a very attractive Islam along the way.
I got out of freiburg main station and saw remains of red and white striped plastic band/rope. 'Right,' I thought, 'there actually has been a lot of tying going on in Freiburg this morning', when people arranged the route for the Freiburg marathon which was run that day. (Unfortunately I didn't have a camera with me, otherwise I would have taken a picture of that tying ...)
Went to the place where I'd parked my bike a couple of days before. 'Now, what will I tie with?', I asked myself. I finally took the plastic bag (that sits on my saddle to prevent my bum from getting soaked) and ripped it so that it maid a long long colourful plastic strip. What now. Where shall I tie it to?
Rang my friend Ingird whom I had to tell about the weekend with Islam - and she was also on for some tying beforehand.
So we met, picked a café and the "place to tie" in front of it. It's in the old, nicy, touristy part of Freiburg, at the bottom of Augustiner Platz, cobblestone street, where some cars pass, but mostly pedestrians. The café though is very nice, it is called "Capri", run by two Italian brothers, with an ice-bar downstairs and a jazz music reading room with all kinds of newspapers upstairs.
Across the café there was a girl sitting on a little wall, looking quite nice and open-minded, so I asked her if she, by any chance, had a digi-camera with her and a couple of minutes time. It turned out that she had, was U.S. American and liked the idea of the (mini-)project. She had a couple of minutes before she had to work as a waitress in one of the bars nearby. So all was ready to start.
Ingrid was a little shocked when she found out that my desire was to tie across the street, not along it. We let a car pass by, the last one for (short) while ;-) and then we tried to tie the strip across the street, to two poles, about hiphigh. It was a little short, so we tried hard to get more strip out of the current one, tied it together, a couple of times, and finally, it lasted.
The girl - whose name I forgot, unfortunately - took a couple of photos meanwhile. I handed her my email address. Then we watched the people who had watched our action before as to how they would behave now. They walked under the strip. The American girl went to work then, Ingrid and I went inside to have our coffee - and when we came back out, the strip was tied to only one of the poles and floating in a "Bächle" - one of the tiny water canals along the roads that kids play in in summer and that Freiburg is so a bit famous for.
And that's the end of the story - that actually got much much longer and more explicit than I'd thought ;-) Now my tummy is making such loud hunger noises that I better go home and feed it. You know how tough it can be for people who meet me, otherwise.
ah, p.s.: unfortunately I never got a mail with photos from the digi-cam girl - I thought about looking for her in the bars around that café, but til now, I didn't. So you now have to imagine all by my words.
~Monika Konigorski