semi-detached

Late last night on my way home from K's after your typical book club meeting (when breaking up at a quarter past 11 we realised that hey, we hadn't actually exchanged one word about the BOOK but never you mind...), full to the brim with a 3-course dinner and really tired, I decided to hop into a taxi halfway rather than carry on walking to the nearest U3 station.

As the cab was speeding down Wipplinger Straße, past the former stock exchange, just round the corner from Coma HQ, I experienced the same sensation I always feel when passing my old hunting grounds, that part of the first district where I spent the greater part of the past 17 years, first at university, then at my first "proper" job. It's a feeling akin to bumping into an old friend you haven't seen for a while but everytime you meet them you realise you can start where you left off the last time you talked to each other.

Next week it will be 5 months since I commenced work for the Firm, just a bit further down (or up, depending) Vienna's "Ring" and no, it's not that I have actually regretted the decision to leave the Realm of the Comatose. And yet...

My new office is not that far away from the old one, is even more central and actually closer to the shopping hotspots I like to prowl, but for some inexplicable reason I always feel wistful and nostalgic when back in the Schottentor area. It's not like visiting my native KLU, a place where I have relinquished the right to feel like a local a long time ago, visits being too short and far between to catch up on things to do and places to go, not that I could be bothered, really. Whenever I'm there, I'm driven by a sense of efficiency more than anything else, knowing that everything I need to do can be done within a day and reached on foot or by bike.

I didn't feel homesick when I studied abroad for a year in my early twenties and have never felt nostalgic about places of town I used to live in before. Not a bit. Thus I find my sentiments for that particular geographical entity somewhat bewildering.

I'll be taking a trip down memory lane tomorrow night by meeting 3 of my Coma HQ colleagues for dinner. In a different part of town altogether.