Centuries of experiences stored
N 56°03'15.6'' E 092°54'37.4''
Day: 7-10
Sunrise:
05:01 – 05:02
Sunset:
22:39 – 22:39
Total kilometers:
10845.80 Km
Temperature – Day (maximum):
16 °C
Temperature – day (minimum):
12 °C
Temperature – Night:
10 °C
Latitude:
56°03’15.6”
Longitude:
092°54’37.4”
We will soon have been in Siberia for another two weeks, although it feels like we only set off yesterday to begin this journey. Time flies by and yet the many new experiences make it feel like we’ve already been on the road for a month. The relativity of time and how we humans perceive it varies enormously. I realize this again and again, especially during our travel life. Sometimes I perceive a single moment as a day, a day as a month and a month as a year. It depends on what I experience and how strange the situation seems to me. Maybe that’s why some days I feel like I have centuries of experiences stored inside me. Not that I feel like a hundred year old man. No, it has nothing to do with that at all. On the contrary, sometimes I think I’ve only just hatched. And yet, when I look at myself in the mirror, I see a face that already has the odd wrinkle, a face that has little to do with the Denis of many years ago. I am now sitting here in the kitchen with our Siberian friends and writing these lines while mom Sascha is already cooking for lunch again. Tanja sits in Jenya’s room and answers the emails that have piled up in the meantime. So we are constantly busy and there’s no time to waste.
Every evening when Jenya and Anja come home from work, they have something planned for us. Once in Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei River, we visit a Mongolian yurt that has been converted into a teahouse and enjoy Mongolian tea specialties and ethnic music. As we stroll home through Krasnoyarsk in the evening, I am startled. Two teenagers standing on a concrete parapet stick their fingers down their throats to vomit together at the same time. “Sorry Denis,” says Jenya, ashamed of the sight. “You don’t need to apologize. Even in Germany, binge drinking among young people is a big problem,” I say and watch as the two of them rejoin their loudly roaring group, take a bottle of indefinable alcohol out of their rucksacks and immediately put it to their lips. We give several such gatherings a wide berth and get on the bus.
