The Bike Ride

And after all the weather was ideal. She could not have had a more perfect day for a bike-ride if she'd ordered it. Breezy, mild, the sky covered in clouds. Only the blue-grey was cut through with lines of pink, blue, and a haze of light gold, as it sometimes is in early fall. The Fulbright TA had been up since a quarter to nine, writing an essay and revising it, until the sentences and the rough ideas seemed to form something coherent and clear. As for the essay, you could not help feeling it understood that essays are what really impress people at a grad school, but that it could not be of use at the place which was most important of all. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds of words had come out to form this essay; William & Mary wanted only 250, and those in response to their own specific question.

Afternoon was not yet over before she went out to go buy flour.

"Where do you think I should put the bike?" asked the just-arrived Russian exchange student, trying to find a spot in the crowded bicycle cage.
"Over to the left a little should be fine." Just two weeks here herself and the TA was assumed to be an authority on the rules governing the bike cage, kitchen, bathroom, and moderately-broken washing machine.

Away the Fulbrighter flew, peddling easily with the bike light successfully turned off. It's so delicious to have an excuse for being out of doors, and besides, she planned to go much farther than Lidl. She loved seeing new parts of Greifswald; she always felt there was something more to discover.

A couple in H&M sweatshirts stood together in the grocery store line. They carried bottles of tea and a large pack of beer and had big backpacks slung over their shoulders. They looked German. Justine wished now that she had not gotten the leaking bag of flour, but there was nowhere to put it, and she couldn't possibly throw it away.

"Hallo," she said to the cashier, copying the Germans' accent. But it sounded so fearfully American that she wondered, as she often did on such occasions, how obvious her accent really was--how long it would take for someone to say, "Oh - er - have you come - are you not really German?"
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That's about as far as I can take the copy change (guess my day wasn't that exciting). Be the first to figure out the source (i.e. what already-written work this post is based on), and you get a prize! No idea what the prize is, but I probably won't see you for at least 9 months, so I have some time to figure it out. And you have some time to forget all about it. ;)