https://www.facebook.com/tyatravel/photos/pb.1567206823491964.-2207520000.1440617134./1609669312579048/?type=3&theater
Hate paying rent? Want to show society you won’t play by their rules? Enjoy pooping in a toilet that is always slightly rocking? Then maybe you should live on a train, like this young woman!
In the proud tradition of Owney the mail dog, the Boxcar Children, and railway hobos in old-timey movies, German college student Leonie Müller lives on a train. Last Saturday, the Washington Post detailed Müller’s life on the rails. After a dispute with her landlord, Müller packed her tidiest bindle, bought an unlimited travel BahnCard 100 ticket, and began an odyssey of aggressively punctual intra-German travel, motion sickness, and sink baths. Conspicuously absent from these activities is sleeping. Müller does not often sleep on the train (because comfortably sleeping on a train remains a purely theoretical concept) and instead crashes with family and friends across the country. So, in addition to seeing if she can live on a train, Müller is also conducting the simultaneous social experiment of learning exactly how much she can make her family and friends resent her.
In the Washington Post‘s article, Müller says she wants to “inspire people to question their habits and the things they consider to be normal.” Though, with the cost of an unlimited ticket being $380, and the previous rent of her apartment only $450, $70 seems like a small price to pay for a bed, a toilet seat that isn’t perpetually dewed with stranger-urine, and all the other wonderful things that make a house a home.
Müller plans on writing about her experience for her thesis project in media studies at Tübingen University. So, it appears that after accepting our blue jeans and Hasselhoffs for so long, Germany has finally embraced America’s bullsh*t academic standards, as well.
There is really only one way to celebrate such a momentous occasion:
**Scroll down for more insight into Müller’s lifestyle via her Facebook account. All jokes aside, we wish her all the very best on her adventure!**
